THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF PRE-RAPHAELITE
PAINTING AND POETRY:  1850-1900

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A Master’s Thesis
                        
Presented to

The School of Graduate Studies

Department of English

Indiana State University

Terre Haute, Indiana

____________________

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the 

Master of Arts Degree

____________________

by

Thomas J. Tobin

May 1996

APPROVAL SHEET

     The thesis of Thomas J. Tobin, Contribution to the School of Graduate Studies, Indiana State University, Series I, Number 1879, under the title The Critical Reception of Pre-Raphaelite Painting and Poetry:  1850-1900 is approved as counting toward the completion of the Master of Arts Degree in the amount of six semester hours of graduate credit. 

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     Date                     Committee Chairperson  

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                                 Committee Member

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                                 Committee Member

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     Date               For the School of Graduate Studies 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

     I wish to thank the members of my thesis committee for all of their guidance throughout the process of compiling my research--Dr. Matthew Brennan for his keen editorial eye, Dr. Devoney Looser for her ability to suggest sources which otherwise would have escaped my buried-in-the-nineteenth-century notice, and Dr. Renée Ramsey for her experience with the technicalities of art-criticism publishing.  Thanks also go to Dr. Kenneth Sroka of Canisius College, both for his marvelous slides and his hints on how to navigate in Victorian magazines without the aid of indices.  
     This project could not have come to fruition without the assistance of Mary Ann Chasko, whose knowledge of British Culture during the 1800s was invaluable as a touchstone against which to sound ideas; and Dr. Harriet McNeal, whose extensive art-historical knowledge of the Quattrocento and Cinquecento proved essential to an understanding of the inspiration for Pre-Raphaelite painting techniques. 
     I am also indebted to the assistance of Dr. Nancy Armstrong of Brown University, who was generous enough to allow me the use of the introduction to her as-yet-unpublished book Things Seen and Unseen, without which a great part of the theory behind this thesis would be incomplete.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

                                                        Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  iii

LIST OF PLATES  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  vii

Chapter

    1.  INTRODUCTION  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    1

          The Pre-Raphaelites as Painters and Poets . .    4

          The Theory of Visuality . . . . . . . . . . .    5

          From Visibility to Visuality:  1850-1900  . .    6

          Introduction of the Paintings . . . . . . . .    9

          Introduction of the Poems . . . . . . . . . .   10

    2.  THE SHIFT FROM VISIBILITY TO VISUALITY BROUGHT 
             ON BY PHOTOGRAPHY  . . . . . . . . . . . .   12

          Visuality, Painting, and Poetry . . . . . . .   13

            Subjects Within and Without Their World . .   15

          Application of Visuality to Other Areas . . .   16

            Do Trends in Criticism of Pre-Raphaelite 
                 Painting and Poetry Confirm the Shift?   18

    3.  THE CIRCLE OF PRE-RAPHAELITE PAINTERS . . . . .   20

          Formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood .   22

          John Ruskin’s Modern Painters . . . . . . . .   23

          The Influence of Robert Browning  . . . . . .   25

          Mediævalist Pre-Raphaelite Painting . . . . .   27

            The Girlhood of Mary Virgin . . . . . . . .   29

            The Eve of Saint Agnes  . . . . . . . . . .   32

            The Lady of Shalott . . . . . . . . . . . .   34

Chapter                                                 Page

            La Belle Dame Sans Merci  . . . . . . . . .   35

          Didactic Pre-Raphaelite Painting  . . . . . .   37

            The Awakening Conscience  . . . . . . . . .   39

            The Vale of Rest  . . . . . . . . . . . . .   42

            Work  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   45

            Beata Beatrix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   48

    4.  TRENDS IN CRITICAL REACTION TO PRE-RAPHAELITE
             PAINTING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   53

          Early Criticism Focuses on Technique  . . . .   53

          Later Criticism Focuses on Didactic Message .   56
    
    5.  THE CIRCLE OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETS  . . . . . .   60

          Formation of the Pre-Raphaelite “School”  . .   60

          Didactic Pre-Raphaelite Poetry  . . . . . . .   62

            “Uphill”  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   63

            “Jenny” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   65

            “The Day is Coming” . . . . . . . . . . . .   67

            “The Commonweal:  A Song for Unionists” . .   68

          Mediævalist Pre-Raphaelite Poetry . . . . . .   69

            “The Defense of Guenevere”  . . . . . . . .   70

            Atalanta in Calydon . . . . . . . . . . . .   73

            “A Royal Princess”  . . . . . . . . . . . .   74

            “Sister Helen”  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   75

    6.  TRENDS IN CRITICAL REACTION TO PRE-RAPHAELITE
             POETRY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   78

          Early Criticism Focuses on Didactic Message .   78

          Later Criticism Focuses on Technique  . . . .   81

Chapter                                                 Page

    7.  CONCLUSION  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   85

          Theory of Visuality as Applicable . . . . . .   86

          Call for Further Research . . . . . . . . . .   88

END NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   90

PLATES  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   98

WORKS CITED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  110

WORKS CONSULTED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  117

LIST OF PLATES

Plate                                                   Page

  1    Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  The Girlhood of Mary
            Virgin  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   98

  2    Photographic Study for The Girlhood of Mary
            Virgin  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   99

  3    John Everett Millais.  The Eve of Saint Agnes  .  100

  4    William Holman Hunt.  The Lady of Shalott  . . .  101

  5    John William Waterhouse.  La Belle Dame Sans 
            Merci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  102

  6    Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  Beata Beatrix . . . . .  103

  7    John Everett Millais.  The Vale of Rest  . . . .  104

  8    William Holman Hunt.  The Awakening Conscience .  105

  9    Ford Madox Brown.  Work  . . . . . . . . . . . .  106

 10    Caricatures of Convent Thoughts and Mariana  . .  107

 11    John Everett Millais.  Sir Isumbras at the Ford   108

 12    Frederick Sandys.  A Nightmare . . . . . . . . .  109

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

It is usually the Victorian poets, such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Robert Browning, who get most of the credit from critics today for changing the social climate in England from one of hyper-conservative religion and sexuality during the early 1800s to the more “free-thinking” fin de siécle climate of the 1890s.  While their writings obviously acted as major forces of social reformation, another equally powerful element helped to bring about such change.  This is the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), as both painters and poets.  Contrary to this spirit of social reform, the Pre-Raphaelites--most notably Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Ford Madox Brown--are usually described, both by contemporary and modern-day critics, as artists whose works reverted to mediæval subjects and ideals.  The Pre-Raphaelites’ aim of social reform was further hampered by the attitudes of the critics of the day, who criticized the social agenda of the PRB’s early poetry, yet commented on only the technical aspects of their early paintings, even when both poem and canvas had the same subject, the same message.  This dualistic attitude carries over into some modern criticism of the PRB, as well.
Cecil Lang’s introduction to The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle (1968) contains a wealth of information about the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais.  Curiously, this book is an anthology and critique of their poetry, not their paintings.  The skeptic may argue that some discussion of Pre-Raphaelite painting must occur to introduce the term “Pre-Raphaelite poetry,” because the very term “Pre-Raphaelite” has associations with painting and not with poetry.  I point to Lang’s twenty-two pages dealing with painting and to the two pages that deal with poetry to suggest the importance Lang places on Pre-Raphaelite painting.
As I have mentioned, the early paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were hailed--or panned--during the latter half of the nineteenth century as a revival of a spirit of mediævalism, and Lang’s introduction clearly points this out.  When Lang turns his discussion to the literary accomplishments of the Pre-Raphaelites, however, he praises their frankness and willingness to test the boundaries of what was then considered good taste in the areas of sexuality and religion.  As writers, according to Lang, the Pre-Raphaelites desired to inform and influence their society about the controversial issues of sexuality and personal spirituality (xi ff.).
Since Lang’s volume deals primarily with the Pre-Raphaelites as poets, he may not be faulted for presenting his study of their influence on Victorian society from a literary point of view.  The first part of his introduction, however, raises the same questions that I have posed about the reviews from nineteenth-century critics:  why do poetry and painting receive different types of criticism?  Were Pre-Raphaelite paintings and poems even meant to have the same kinds of effects, or were their aims different?
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in a letter to his friend William Allingham in 1854, said that “[i]f any man has any poetry in him, he should paint, for it has all been said and written, and they have scarcely begun to paint it” (74).  If indeed Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry had the same goals, as this passage suggests, then why were the two media originally received by the Victorian critical press in such different ways?
To return briefly to Lang, his introduction serves as an echo of critical views near the middle of the 1800s:  poetry was a much greater influence than painting on the attitudes of the public toward sexual mores and religious views.  He claims that impetus for social change came from poets--such as Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne--not from painters (xix).  The contemporary critic John Ruskin’s early writings also espouse this view, saying that paintings were to be admired for their beauty while poems were to be analyzed for their didactic content (Modern Painters 87).
Even a hasty reading of today’s major critics who deal with the Victorians--among them Northrop Frye and Timothy Hilton--suggests that only writers, essayists, and poets made up the vanguard of social reformers in Victorian England.  This theory ignores the effect of painters upon society.  If literature were indeed the sole agent of social change in Victorian England, the Pre-Raphaelites would be agents of progressive change only in their capacities as writers, and agents of regressive reminiscing in their capacities as painters.

The Pre-Raphaelites as Painters and Poets
In its coverage of the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, the Illustrated London News of May 17 praises Ford Madox Brown’s painting Chaucer at the Court of Edward III because of its excellence of technique, saying that he “has really represented a scene of great interest much as it probably occurred, and in the sense of style of an artist thoroughly alive to the importance of his subject” (416).  The News also congratulates Madox Brown on having “no Pre-Raphaelite nonsense” (416) in this composition.  Nowhere does the review mention Madox Brown’s didactic agenda in his painting; Brown’s message is secondary to his painting technique. 
This situation had reversed itself by the late 1800s, however.  Instead of their paintings, the Pre-Raphaelites found their poetry being criticized for matters of technique.  The sort of criticism that earlier had been directed at painting was now aimed at poetry, and vice versa.  Robert Buchanan says in “The Fleshly School of Poetry” (1872) that if Dante Gabriel Rossetti is to be counted at all among the masters--as Buchanan calls Tennyson and Browning--it is not for his poetry, about whose technique Buchanan wonders that “no one accused Mr. Rossetti of naughtiness” (36), and which has “a most affected choice of Latin diction” (39).  Rossetti’s paintings fare little better by Buchanan, but they are discussed as to their effects; they give a “sense of weary, wasting, yet exquisite sensuality; nothing virile, nothing tender, nothing completely sane” (34).  By alluding to the sense which is evoked by the paintings, Buchanan focuses his criticism on the didactic elements present in Rossetti’s paintings.  

The Theory of Visuality
Why did the critical receptions given to Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting change places between the 1850s and the fin de siècle?  I think that at least part of the answer to this question lies in what Nancy Armstrong has termed the advent of “visuality,” as opposed to “visibility,” in nineteenth-century Britain.  Visuality, as defined by Armstrong, is a way of thinking about a composition--whether it be a painting, poem, or other “text”--from a detached point of view.  The viewer or reader is not considered part of the thing being viewed.  In “City Things:  Photography and the Urbanization Process,” Armstrong posits that the discovery of relatively inexpensive photogravure processes in the early nineteenth century led ultimately to a subtle shift in England from a literature-centered culture--in which primacy is given to the written word for information--to an icon-centered one--which depended more greatly on visual detail for meaning (16).  Armstrong does not go so far as to say that the introduction of cheaper methods of producing photographs diminished the popularity of either painting or poetry, but her work does suggest that the English of the 1890s were far more likely to accept a painting as socially meaningful than were the English of the 1850s.  Foucault defines this shift in Discipline and Punish, saying that “[v]isibility is a trap” (200) into which we are apt to fall; only a more detached viewpoint which views both the written word and the pictorial image as iconographic--visuality--can give a good perspective from which to comment and criticize.  This helps to explain the way in which the PRB’s paintings and poems received different kinds of criticism at different times during the century.  

From Visibility to Visuality:  1850-1900
If this shift from visibility to visuality is indeed applicable in areas outside photography--if it is a useful tool for understanding the way British culture re-defined itself during the 1800s--then it could help to explain why, by 1872, Robert Buchanan denounces the symbolic sexuality in Rossetti’s paintings, but conversely takes great exception to Rossetti’s “ill-constructed” verses.  Because of the shift in episteme between 1850 and 1900, I propose, Buchanan misses the didactic aspect in Rossetti’s poetry in 1872, but does not miss it in his paintings.  
To get a sense of what led to this change in critical viewpoints, I will first examine the epistemic shift from visibility to visuality, in Armstrong’s terms.  She argues, briefly, that subjects are within their environments--like pedestrians noting details of a street scene of which they are  parts--until the camera introduces a new type of point of view in 1844.  The camera forces subjects to adopt a “distance,” to step back and view things from a detached viewpoint--like postcard shots of an entire city, taken from the hills outside town.  This shift from subject-in-narrative to detached observer--visibility to visuality--also manifests itself in the collective case of the Pre-Raphaelites, if we look at them as both painters and poets.  
As already mentioned, changes in British social attitudes toward such topics as sexual expression, religion, and the spiritual nature of labor have been credited by many present-day scholars, such as Lane, to poets such as Browning, Tennyson, and Arnold.  These changes were also credited to the Pre-Raphaelites in their roles as poets, but only a few PRB contributions in painting were so praised, and then only toward the end of the century.  My research indicates that the Pre-Raphaelites were not merely the “quaint mediævalists” that critics such as Lionel Stevenson still often term them today (45).  The Pre-Raphaelites, as poets as well as painters, were also a very powerful didactic force, helping to bring about social change with both the pen and the brush, although nineteenth-centruy critics could not simultaneously see both painting and poetry as meaning-giving modes of discourse.  This was so because visibility, in force until the middle of the century, emphasized the written word as most capable of didacticism.  Visuality, which developed as the century progressed, gave more credence to the visual image as didactic.  
To substantiate my argument, I have decided to examine eight Pre-Raphaelite paintings and contemporary reactions to them.  At first glance, these paintings seem to fall evenly into two categories:  “quaint mediævalist” pictures, which take their subject matter and painting techniques from the Middle Ages and the Italian Quattrocento; and less-recognized didactic paintings, whose social messages supersede the artists’ pride in technical mastery. 
These polar categories--mediævalist and didactic--are artificial ones that I have imposed upon the paintings and poems I shall discuss.  I do not claim that any of the works to which I shall make reference are either completely mediæval or completely didactic.  Indeed, the Pre-Raphaelites themselves thought of their works as, ideally, combinations of these two elements (W. Rossetti, PRB Journal 3-6).  I have chosen to separate the works into these two categories because contemporary critical writings seem to make fairly consistent use of them.  By using these categories myself, I can most clearly illustrate the shift in critical attitudes toward Pre-Raphaelite works.  An odd effect of this division is that some of the later paintings I have identified as exemplary of mediævalism were seen by contemporary critics as didactic works, just as some later poems I term didactic were criticized for their mediæval technique.  
I do not view this dichotomy as a problem, for if the shift from visibility to visuality is a gradual progression and not a sudden change, then there ought to be cases that fall between my admittedly static categories.  With this scheme in mind, I have chosen eight paintings and eight poems to represent the works of the Pre-Raphaelites between roughly 1850 and 1900.   

Introduction of the Paintings 
The first four paintings I have chosen uphold the Pre-Raphaelite image of mediæval chivalry, as in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin.  The remaining four represent the more progressively liberal “other half” of the Pre-Raphaelites’ work, as William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience illustrates.  Reviews of earlier paintings in both of these groups focus on the mediæval mind-set and painting technique of the painters, and only later in the century does criticism discuss the element of expected social change seen in these compositions.  Such a shift exemplifies Armstrong’s theory of the shift from visibility to visuality.  This shift in the contemporary reviews also supports my claim about the dual nature of Pre-Raphaelite art, and leads me to believe that the arguments of critics such as Christopher Wood, who see the Pre-Raphaelites as engaged in regressive reminiscing (Olympian Dreamers ix), are not wrong, but merely incomplete.  

Introduction of the Poems
From this ground of the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites’ paintings, I will turn to eight poems, two from each of the major Pre-Raphaelite writers:  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister Christina, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne.  The trend in the criticism that deals with the poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites is almost exactly the opposite of that generated by their paintings.  I will give some examples of such criticism, which show that the poetry written by the Pre-Raphaelites can also be divided, albeit artificially, into mediæval-themed and social-reform-minded works.  In this criticism, early Pre-Raphaelite poems, again in both groups, are analyzed for their didacticism, while later poems receive commentary based on their meter, archaism, and technique--a second instance of support for my theory that the shift from visibility to visuality involved a decreasing tendency to credit verbal description--poetry, in this case--with didactic power.  
To conclude my argument, I will examine briefly the comments of Claude Phillips, an art critic of the 1890s; and a letter from Max Beerbohm, another noted turn-of-the-century critic.  These critics realize that for a work to be Pre-Raphaelite in nature, it must contain elements of the visible and the visual, illustrating one of the main tenets of Pre-Raphaelitism:  the Horatian principle of ut pictura poesis, that painting and poetry are sister arts.  If the canvases and pages of the Pre-Raphaelites were intended to inform each other, my application of the shift toward visuality to the PRB uncovers the reason for the disparity between the criticism of Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry between the 1850s and 1900. 

Chapter 2

THE SHIFT FROM VISIBILITY TO 
VISUALITY BROUGHT ON BY PHOTOGRAPHY

Jonathan Crary, in his book Techniques of the Observer:  On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, stresses that the advent of photography brought with it a change in the process by which people understood the world around them.  He uses the similarity between the eye and artificial visual recording instruments--in this case, the telescope, microscope, and camera--to illustrate this change: 

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that relationship had been essentially metaphoric:  the eye and the camera obscura or the eye and the telescope or microscope were allied by a conceptual similarity, in which the authority of an ideal eye remained unchallenged.  (129)
In other words, Crary argues that before the invention of photography around 1844--when Henry Fox Talbot published The Pencil of Nature (qtd. in Armstrong, “City Things” 33)--things seen through the camera obscura, or the telescope or microscope, were understood to be representations of, interpretations of, what really was there.  The camera obscura, for instance, worked in much the same way as the eye.  Both have analogous structures; light enters a small aperture and strikes a wall at the back of the eye/box, creating an image which can then be interpreted.  
	Crary then contrasts this viewpoint to that which arises after the invention of the camera.  The camera obscura, telescope, and microscope merely resemble the eye in their workings.  The camera, however, becomes a complement to the eye, augmenting its capacity to record and digest visual data:  

Beginning in the nineteenth century, the relationship between eye and optical apparatus becomes one of metonymy:  both are now contiguous instruments on the same plane of operation, with varying capabilities and features.  The limits and deficiencies of one will be complemented by the capacities of the other and vice versa.  (129)
After this section, Crary explains that a shift occurs in the manner in which the eye/object relationship is perceived (130-1).  
	After the invention of photography, optical devices (and the images they produce) are no longer thought of as means toward interpreting visual data, but as the data themselves.  A photograph, in other words, is a simulacrum of, rather than an interpretation of, an image upon it.  Instead of calling to mind associations of that image, it is an image in its own right.  

Visuality, Painting, and Poetry
Nancy Armstrong uses Crary’s idea of the shift, but in terms of visibility and visuality.  Visibility may be thought of as a very subject-centered way of seeing the world around you, with the operative word being “around.”  The observer is a part of, is surrounded by his or her environment.  In painting, I believe this means that a canvas is representational, presenting a hypothetical extension of the viewer’s own eyesight.  Contrarily, poetry serves a didactic purpose.  Words can convey messages more effectively than can images.  
Visuality, for Armstrong, represents a detached viewpoint, in which observers are removed from the visual milieu.  Visual data are objectified, symbolic.  Poetry, in a visual scheme, is representational, extending the reader’s own “imaginational space,” so to speak.  Painting and photography, indeed any visual images, are invested with meaning, and can serve didactic functions.  I interpret this as images being able to convey messages more effectively than can words.  
In a lecture at Indiana State University on 14 April 1995, Armstrong spoke of Crary’s work as positing a “regime of visuality,” saying that “to see is to know, for the visually-oriented Victorians.”  She also commented that before the invention of photography, the written word was the primary means by which people understand their world, creating a dichotomy of known/unknown.  After 1844, Armstrong said, visual data played a steadily greater role in didacticism, creating a new dichotomy of seen/unseen.  The tenor of the shift between these two dichotomies may be summed up in the following sets of dichotomies, which show a continuum from 1850 to 1900:  individualized visibility/mass visuality, known-unknown/seen-unseen, realism and the senses/decadence and sight, eye-object/copy-simulacrum, and tangible world/symbols.  I wish to use the concept of such a continuum to explain the shift in the terms by which Victorian critics judged painting and poetry--specifically of the Pre-Raphaelites. 
	To reiterate, early criticism is visible in nature, assigning didactic meaning to the written word, and decorative, technical functions to painting.  Late criticism is visual, wherein paintings are didactic and poems are criticized on a technical level.  Between these two extremes, say around 1865 or 1870, aspects of both visibility and visuality can be seen in the critical writings on both painting and poetry.  

Subjects Within and Without Their World
	Because of the invention of photography, visual images took on a greater capacity to impart meaning.  Armstrong explains the shift in “City Things”: 

In so revising the cultural logic of visibility, I would argue, the invention of photography did much more than shift the relationship between apparatus and eye from one of resemblance to one of complimentarity.  Insofar as it paved the way for the mass reproducibility of images, the photograph operated more as a supplement . . . to the image of objects that could be seen with the eye . . . [The photograph] reduces its subject to the visible traces of places, people, or things.  (9)
Here, Armstrong clarifies Crary’s distinction while putting her own spin on the effects of photography.  She refines the argument in her forthcoming book Things Seen and Unseen, saying that photography

transformed the very being of the object as well.  Rather than the image of an object pure and simple, photography offered the observer the objectification of a glance, neither his own nor that of the photographer so much as a glance that no one owns up to, because it is one that belongs to the culture.  The reproduction that results cannot be understood simply as another copy, because it confers a new reality on the thing it represents, that of the already seen . . . .  [O]bjects would henceforth be seen just as photographs had pictured them.  (9-10)
This objectification is explained in a later section, when Armstrong speaks of the photograph as transforming an image “from a visible space that surrounded the observer into a space from which he could step back and view in much the same way he would a large object” (16).
	Armstrong does not explicitly say so, but I believe that this distancing effect invests the photograph with meaning in much the same way that paintings are said to have “meaning.” This leads me back to my main point:  the shift between visibility and visuality as it applies to contemporary criticism of the Pre-Raphaelites. 

Application of Visuality to Other Areas
To relate Armstrong’s argument to my own requires a few limitations, however.  I cannot argue that the shift from visibility to visuality can be broadly applied to many aspects of Victorian society, as Armstrong does in Things Seen and Unseen, although it seems a reasonable supposition.  In a more limited sense, I believe that Armstrong’s distinctions between the two epistemes are useful in talking of the relative importance of the written word and the visual image during the latter half of the nineteenth century. 
For example, in sketches for the composition of Ford Madox Brown’s painting Work (1865), the figure representing Carlyle is absent in many early drawings.  A photographic plate exists of Carlyle in the pose in which he is found in Work, and it seems likely that Brown used photographs as guides for his composition (Harrison 20 ff.).  According to Armstrong, this is evidence that Brown did not need Carlyle to be present to paint him, because the photograph accurately represented him. Dante Rossetti wrote to his mother in 1863 for 

the photograph of Old Cairo which hangs in your parlour; and, if there are any stereoscopic pictures, either in the instrument or elsewhere, which represent general views of cities, would you send them too, or anything of a fleet of ships?  I want to use them in painting Troy at the back of my Helen, and will return them soon. (Letters 2:  479)
From this letter I gather that Dante Rossetti had accepted the pictures his mother owned as acceptable substitutes--as simulacra--for Cairo, city scenes, and a naval fleet. 
The above explication of the particulars of Armstrong’s theory is necessarily detailed to give a general understanding of my partial application of her theory.  I wish to make particular use of Armstrong’s point that Victorian society placed its emphasis on the written word as the primary vehicle for the conveyance of meaning around 1850, while the emphasis shifted to visual data as meaning-bearing as the century drew to a close.  I wish to test this effect of Armstrong’s theory through an examination of the critical reception of Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry in the latter half of the nineteenth century.  

Do Trends in Criticism of Pre-Raphaelite Painting and Poetry Confirm the Shift?
	If the photograph creates for the viewer a “space from which he could step back and view in much the same way he would a large object,” as Armstrong has already stated, then it is only doing what painting had been doing for hundreds of years before.  The difference between photography and painting had been in the clarity of detail possible, until the Pre-Raphaelites began to use photographs to gain greater accuracy in their compositions. 
	If Armstrong’s ideas about the general cultural shift from visibility to visuality are indeed valid, then we might also see a shift in the focus of criticism aimed at Pre-Raphaelite works as well.  To sum up, early Pre-Raphaelite paintings ought not to be criticized for their didactic elements, unlike later paintings.  Conversely, early Pre-Raphaelite poems ought indeed to be criticized for their social agenda, but later ones ought not.  There should, finally, be some sort of middle ground, around 1870 or so, in which both aspects of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and poems are brought under critical scrutiny--thus showing a gradual change from visibility to visuality, as opposed to a sudden switch.  With these expectations in mind, I now turn to the first of my examinations:  the paintings produced by the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and the criticism they received.

Chapter 3

THE CIRCLE OF PRE-RAPHAELITE PAINTERS

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was alone in the mid-nineteenth century, or nearly so, in that its members wished to use both visible and visual elements in their works.  In order for a painting or poem to be considered Pre-Raphaelite, I argue, it must contain both exacting attention to technical detail and clear didactic content.  The PRB was formed with the intention of combining the then-thought-of “duties” of poetry (didacticism) and painting (mediævalism).  I ascribe these function to poetry and painting because the PRB was formed in 1849, from within the discourse of visibility.  A short sketch of the Royal Academy schools and the inception of the Brotherhood illustrates this duality of purpose.
The PRB began when a group of young painters declared their dissatisfaction with the established art education system in England:  the Royal Academy of the Arts school.  The PRB thought the Academy to be a stuffy, exclusionary institution that strangled the naturally creative young men who went “through the grind” (Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 44).  Membership in the Royal Academy entitled an artist to put the initials “R. A.” after his name, in much the same fashion as being a baronet conferred honor upon the lowly patronymic with the addition of “Bart.”  The Illustrated London News of 15 March 1851 expressed the prestige of the Royal Academy with tongue in cheek: 

To become an R. A. [member of the Royal Academy] is the leading object of an artist’s life; it is his K. G. [Knight of the Garter] and G. C. B. [Knight Grand Cross of the Bath], and his “collar of Esses.”  To be one of forty chosen out of four thousand is no inconsiderable honour.  But this is not all.  The fact of his being an R. A. gives him a position within society; he is admitted into the Athenæum Club without going to the ballot; and at a Macready dinner has his seat on the daïs; and, while all below is cold and poor, has his hot chickens, and his first-class champagne.  (219) 
The Academy taught the painting techniques of the “old masters,” whose style dated to the late 1600s--one which tended toward the decorative, rather than the didactic.  The Royal Academy, then, was firmly entrenched in the visible, assigning little didactic worth to the art of painting.  Dante Rossetti wrote that by the 1830s, painting had essentially stagnated, with the notable exception of Turner’s work (Fam. Letters 16).  What had kept English painters from experimenting with brighter colors or global detail in painting was a healthy sense of tradition (Ruskin, Modern Painters 99 ff.).  Brown, murky pictures were the acceptable norm, and made money for the artist, so the Royal Academy, as arbiter of taste for an entire nation, continued teaching those methods of painting.  

Formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
To understand the motivation behind many of the new technical means used by the Pre-Raphaelites, it may help to describe the manner in which the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood came into being.  It was in and around--and later in spite of--the Royal Academy schools that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed.  Timothy Hilton’s description of the formation of the PRB illustrates the Academy’s direct, if somewhat antithetical, influence: 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti . . . went to Sass’s [prep-school in 1841], where he remained for the next four years.  In 1839, two years before Rossetti arrived, . . . a brilliant child [Millais] from the Channel Islands had begun his attendance. . . .  [A]t the unprecedentedly early age of eleven, in 1840, [Millais] became a probationary student at the Royal Academy. (28)  
In the early summer of 1848, after having dropped out of school and apprenticing himself to Ford Madox Brown, a prominent Romantic painter, Rossetti befriended William Holman Hunt, a student in the Academy.  Hilton continues, “Of the two, it was Rossetti who had more ideas; but there was no doubt that Hunt was the person who knew how to paint, and Rossetti appealed to his new friend for instruction” (28).  Millais had been in Oxford during the summer of 1848.  Hunt made the introductions, and later they founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
	The Brotherhood was formed by the triumvirate of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais in early September 1848.  These three young painters were disillusioned with what they termed the “grandiose disregard of the simplicity of truth” (qtd. in Hilton, 29).  They set up their secret society of seven members, which was dedicated both to the truthful rendering of subjects on canvas and to social reform through their paintings (PRB Journal 44).  This “truthful rendering” would eventually help to bring about changes in the way British society viewed its own sexuality and spirituality.  The PRB laid claim to a bond between themselves and the Italian painters of the Quattrocento (14th Century), just before Raphael’s painting style began to influence the techniques used by painters.  Hilton, and other scholars with him, conjecture that this is the source of the name “Pre-Raphaelites” (Hilton 15).  The members of the PRB modeled their techniques and didactic aims on the theories of their older contemporaries John Ruskin and Robert Browning.  

John Ruskin’s Modern Painters
The Pre-Raphaelites’ essays into the then-strict world of painting were often met with scorn and criticism, but they held fast to their ideals, specifically their anti-Classicism and their emphasis on natural detail, which they drew from John Ruskin’s Modern Painters.  The influence of John Ruskin, especially, shows that the Pre-Raphaelites did not, by any means, introduce something completely new to the world of painting; their work was a small but important part of a larger continuum of changing techniques and theories about the nature and methods of painting.  
Ruskin came to his theories about painting through long, direct experience of natural scenes, and so became a sort of progenitor of many of the tenets of Pre-Raphaelitism.  In 1848, the year of the PRB’s founding, Ruskin was already an established art critic, painter, and traveler.  When young, Ruskin saw the Alps on a trip to Switzerland, and a new love was born.  As Timothy Hilton explains, “with the inspiration of Wordsworth and Turner, Ruskin looked at the Alps, drew them, and wrote poems about them” (12).  The love of nature and attention to detail one finds in Ruskin’s sketch-books translate well into his early writings about the nature of painting.  
The first two editions of his Modern Painters (1843 and 1846) are highly personal as well as precisely descriptive, reflecting his attitude toward art.  Ruskin especially lampooned the Royal Academy’s slavish copying of the old Dutch masters, jeering at Sir George Beaumont’s “where do you put your brown tree?” dictum of technical accuracy (45).  
Instead, Ruskin praises Turner for his fidelity to natural detail.  Turner’s paintings, according to Ruskin, are beautiful because they are true, and Modern Painters emphasizes the importance of truth over artifice.  As Hilton explains, 

European painting of the post-Renaissance tradition, because it was stylized, formulaic, and untruthful to the facts of nature, could not be anything but loathsome.  Claude, Poussin, the classical masters of the landscape tradition, the religious painters of the High Renaissance (especially the “clear and tasteless poison [after] the art of Raphael”), the genre painters of the Dutch school, were all therefore to be execrated.  (14)
The young Pre-Raphaelites took their cue from such pronouncements, eventually refining Ruskin’s statements into a hierarchy of good and bad works (W. Rossetti, PRB Journal 10 ff.).  William Michael Rossetti transcribes in The P. R. B. Journal for 10 October 1849 a portion of a letter from his brother Dante, who was then in Paris.  Dante writes concerning “the rate of locomotion which the style of the old Masters induced in Hunt and myself at the Louvre” (19), thus firmly attesting to the Pre-Raphaelite disdain for the things then taught at the Royal Academy.  They modeled their techniques after those espoused by Ruskin but were inspired by the poet Robert Browning in their didactic aims.

The Influence of Robert Browning
After Ruskin, another major theoretical influence on the Pre-Raphaelites was the poet Robert Browning, who defined his poetry in terms of painting.  Comparing his poetry to a prism, he describes the poet’s function as that of a painter who makes the reader see:  “I only make men and women speak, giving you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me” (qtd. in Griffin and Minchin 57).  Browning’s literary work seems most evocative when he is describing the process by which a painter comes to complete his work.  In his poem “Fra Lippo Lippi” (1855), Browning shows that the PRB has also had a reciprocal influence on his own works.  Browning portrays the artist Lippi as a sensual, worldly painter who has become interested in the spirit of art as a vehicle for a message of realism and secular humanism that had come to symbolize the work of Pre-Raphaelites:  “Faces, arms, legs and bodies like the true / As much as pea and pea” (177-8). Fra Lippo says of his motivation that

				we’re made so that we love 
First when we see painted, things we have passed 
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; 
And so they are better, painted.  (300-3)  
Basing their own personal philosophies of the artist’s role in society largely on the ideas of Ruskin and Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites found themselves thrown together by time, place and, somewhat less definitively, ideology.  The Pre-Raphaelites thus created their works--both paintings and poems--with both mediæval techniques and didactic messages in mind.  Both mediævalism and didacticism were part of “the Pre-Raphaelite,” though some works emphasize one aspect over the other.  Even so, both are always present and intended by the artists, which I will illustrate in my discussions of individual works.  
	I divide the Pre-Raphaelites’ works in this manner to show that the criticism leveled at their works does not adhere to these two categories.  Rather, many works that appear to be decorative shows of technical achievement are criticized for their didactic messages, and many pieces intended to have an effect on society are discussed by contemporary critics in terms of their mediævalistic technique.  To help explain this apparent contradiction in terms of the shift from visibility to visuality, I will now turn to four paintings that were intended to be seen for their mediævalist technical praxis rather than their social effects.  

Mediævalist Pre-Raphaelite Painting
The influence of Victorian poets, such as Browning and Tennyson, is evident in many of the PRB’s paintings, which often take their subjects from the poems of their literary contemporaries.  To illustrate the influence of mediæval themes on Pre-Raphaelite painting, I will examine four paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and John William Waterhouse.  Waterhouse, who flourished after 1870, was not one of the original Pre-Raphaelites, but his paintings were often criticized for their Pre-Raphaelite elements and tone. 
These first four paintings illustrate the mediævalism of the PRB’s techniques--such as using minute detail in all parts of the canvas.  Also inherent in these paintings is a didactic commentary on the issue of sexuality--the PRB’s use of hair as a symbol for the sexual organs, but it is secondary to the paintings’ technical achievements.  In a letter to his brother William dated 22 November 1848, Dante Rossetti said of his then-in-progress The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) that “I wrote yesterday the subjoined sonnet touching my picture, for the [exhibition] catalogue. . . .  I have here used it in allusion to the allegory of the picture” (Letters 1: 50).  This focus on detail and technique is echoed by Holman Hunt’s 1889 statements on his progress in painting The Lady of Shalott (ca. 1886-1905):  “I allowed increased space above the head and at the sides of the composition, which gave room for new inventions to make manifest the significance of the subject” (Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 2: 377).  In other words, the message of each of these works was subservient to the means by which it was represented, whether allegorically or with the “new inventions” which are painted in Hunt’s composition as bas relief panels of a praying saint, Jason stealing the apples of the Hesperides, and Mary trampling the serpent. 
These paintings also illustrate the PRB’s reliance upon poetry for their subject matter.  Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin is linked to a pair of his own sonnets, the first of which has already been alluded to; Millais’ The Eve of Saint Agnes (1862) depicts an episode from Keats’ poem of the same name; William Holman Hunt’s The Lady of Shalott portrays a scene from Tennyson’s mediæval-subject poem “The Lady of Shalott”; and Waterhouse’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1893) deals with Keats’ poem on the same mediæval subject.  
	The criticism leveled at these four paintings is, if not well-deserved, at least accurate in its aim.  Criticism of earlier works devotes itself almost exclusively to panning the mediæval elements in the paintings, while the criticism of later works, such as of Waterhouse’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1893), devotes nearly equal time to mediævalism and the painters’ social agenda.

The Girlhood of Mary Virgin
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (Plate 1) reveals his fascination with women’s hair:  one of the symbolic representations of a theme which also figures in many of the works of the other members of the Brotherhood.  William Michael Rossetti’s diaries reveal that in his brother’s preoccupation with hair, he was merely giving voice to the common Victorian allegory of hair as a symbol for the sexual organs (66).  Since openly discussed sexuality was a social taboo in mid-nineteenth-century England, hair plays an important role in many of the PRB’s paintings. 
This marriage of message with visual cue embodied ut pictura poesis and was one of the very first principles adopted by the Brotherhood.  Often a Pre-Raphaelite painting relies on poetic support offered by the painter himself, just as Turner’s Snowstorm did in 1812.  Rossetti accompanied The Girlhood of Mary Virgin with two sonnets to complement the painting.  The painting is so heavily symbolic that Rossetti wrote the two sonnets on the original frame to explain all the symbols in it.  Rossetti’s sonnets offer useful explanations of the symbolism in the painting, such as “The seven-thorned briar and the palm seven-leaved / Are her great sorrows and her great reward” (Works 156), in reference to the way in which the plants behind the figure of Mary foreshadow the crucifixion of Christ.  Rossetti thought, however, that it was a good idea to remain mute in his sonnets about the meaning of the hair-symbol in his painting (Fam. Letters 54), presumably lest his audience report him to the authorities as a “purveyor of indecency.” 
Another tenet of Pre-Raphaelitism centered on Ruskin’s idea of Truth (cf. Ruskin, Modern Painters 104-8).  This tenet became, for the PRB, a strict adherence to specific detail over the whole of the canvas.  The photo-realistic detail of The Girlhood of Mary Virgin is striking and original. The method by which Rossetti painted the picture helped him to achieve such minute clarity of detail and brightness of color.  His friend and fellow PRB painter William Bell Scott saw Dante Rossetti working on the painting and remarked, 

He was painting in oils with water-colour brushes, as thinly as in water-colour, on canvas which he had primed with white till the surface was as smooth as cardboard, and every tint remained transparent.  (250) 
This technique of painting a thin wash of color on a pure white ground gave Rossetti’s painting a luminosity that made it more true to Nature, as Ruskin advised.  The color in the painting is indeed very bright; the gold lettering on the spines of the books stands out against the somber tones of the books themselves, as does the white-and-yellow embroidery on a bright scarlet cloth in the foreground. 
Using The Girlhood of Mary Virgin as an example, we can see that the Pre-Raphaelites had three goals in mind when creating their pictures.  Colors need to be bright and luminous; the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue dominate many Pre-Raphaelite canvases.  Attention is paid to the smallest detail, whether it be in the foreground or in the background; such “photo-realism,” Brian Coe points out, had not yet been attained by the camera oscura by 1849 (6).  Fidelity to nature rounds out the list; the Pre-Raphaelites placed images in their paintings that most closely resembled the objects themselves. 
Despite Rossetti’s equation of human sexuality and divine love through his use of hair symbolism in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, the painting did not draw much criticism about the message it portrayed.  Rather, the criticism of Mary Virgin focuses on Rossetti’s painting technique, or lack thereof.  Indeed, the 20 April 1850 issue of The Athenæum had much to say about this painting and its companion piece Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850): 

Here, a certain amount of talent is distorted from its legitimate course by a prominent crotchet.  Ignoring all that has made the art great in the works of the greatest masters, the school to which Mr. Rosetti [sic] belongs would begin the work anew, and accompany the faltering steps of its earliest explorers. . . .  An unintelligent imitation of the mere technicalities of Old Art--golden glories, fanciful scribblings on the frames, and other infantine [sic] absurdities--constitutes all its claim.  (424)
The Athenæum critic does not condemn Rossetti’s paintings as blasphemous, even though the typology of both canvases suggests Roman Catholicism--the suspicious “popery” against which many mid-century magazines and newspapers railed.  In this case, the didacticism of the paintings is ignored in favor of an attack on Rossetti’s technique.

The Eve of Saint Agnes
The Eve of St. Agnes (Plate 3) further illustrates the influence of poetry on Pre-Raphaelite paintings.  John Everett Millais relied upon the Keats poem for the subject of his painting.  The Eve of St. Agnes depicts a scene which deals with a mediæval legend about two lovers who run away with each other on St. Agnes’ Eve.  Millais chose to depict the moment in Keats’ poem when Madeline is undressing in the moonlight, watched secretly by her lover Porphyro from a closet: 

  Anon his heart revives:  her vespers done,
  Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
  Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
  Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
  Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees: 
  Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
  Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
  In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.  
(26:  1-9)
Millais also followed the guidelines of the PRB.  The study for this poem was done at the King’s bedroom at Knole, where Millais found out that the moonlight was not strong enough to throw colors from a stained glass window onto the floor, as is suggested in the poem.  Allen Lane notes that to be faithful to Keats’ poem--”nature” in the Ruskinian sense--Millais placed a lantern outside the window at night to study the color patterns on the floor (199).  This fidelity to both nature and poetry reflects the Brotherhood’s attitude of “true rendering.” 
The structure of the painting is painstakingly plotted to seem as though it is not.  The picture is divided neatly in half, with one half devoted to Madeline and the colored reflections on the floor, and the other half to the shadows of the closet and the hidden face of Porphyro.  The attention to detail and color is even more evident in this painting than in Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin; the effect of light is captured especially well.  According to Lane, the stained-glass shadows required more than one hundred twenty-five different colors (200).  More generally, the portions of the room in shadow are painted in a grainy, out-of-focus manner.  The jewelry box in the lower right of the picture, however, has moonlight shining directly on it, and is painted accordingly in crisp detail.  To paint “the object as in itself it really is,” as Walter Pater defined the purpose of Victorian art (508), is clearly illustrated in this painting.  Even though Millais was trying to paint according to Nature, á la Ruskin, the critical press condemned him as being “anxious to produce an effect at all risks, and to astonish if not to please” (Athenæum, 9 May 1857, 602).  This comment on Millais’ technique does not touch upon the dream-like mood which the painting evokes, but on Millais’ obvious squandering of his talent in painting the minutiæ of the colors thrown by the stained glass window. 

The Lady of Shalott
William Holman Hunt, like Millais, saw something of value in the poetry of his contemporaries, and his painting of a scene from Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” shows both the meta-artistic concern of the poet and the painter’s reliance on the poet to provide a genesis for his picture.  The scene Hunt chooses to recreate in The Lady of Shalott (Plate 4) is the one in which the lady is still busy weaving her web of pictures from her enchanted mirror: 

There she weaves by night and day
A Magic web with colors gay. 
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
	To look down to Camelot. 
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
	The Lady of Shalott.  (2:  37-45)
Here, as in Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, Holman Hunt expresses a fascination with hair; the lady’s tresses occupy nearly the upper fourth of the painting.  The prominence given in this painting to wild, unbound hair is symbolic of the PRB’s free-thinking attitude toward sexuality.  The intense colors and minute detail come as no surprise.  The loom on which the Lady is working contains very bright specimens of yellow around the Grail, blue in Lancelot’s armor, and white in the representation of the host.  Even the bas relief images on the floor are painted with astounding delicacy, as are each of the differently sculpted legs of the loom. 
Christopher Wood notes that the painting was begun in 1886, but not completed until 1905, after Holman Hunt spent years perfecting the details of the picture (The Pre-Raphaelites 109).  Because of the delay involved in the completion of The Lady of Shalott, the reviews of the painting almost all center on the didactic message of the work.  When The Lady of Shalott was finally presented to the public in 1905, many critics were at a loss to describe a Pre-Raphaelite painting in Impressionist terms.  The Art Journal, as early as 1879, uses the term “Pre-Raphaelite” as a general adjective to denote Quattrocento works, as in its April preview of the 1879 Royal Academy Exhibition:  “Gallery IV is, as usual, devoted to the Pre-Raphaelite period” (105).  The phrase “as usual” here denotes a discussion of technique, not a didactic message--the category “Pre-Raphaelite” has been accepted into the canon of critical vernacular, but only as a way of distinguishing a painting technique. 

La Belle Dame Sans Merci
John William Waterhouse, whose works date predominantly after 1880, was not an original member of the Brotherhood, but, emulating them, he practiced the concept of ut pictura poesis in his paintings.  His La Belle Dame Sans Merci (Plate 5) takes its subject from Keats’ poem of the same name, and shows the poem’s eponymous lady restraining her knight with her hair.  The hair/sexuality connection arises once more, this time in a depiction of the potential sexual power that women can hold over men.  
The symbolic pattern in this work is one composed of primary colors and flowers, two typically Pre-Raphaelite touchstones.  The knight’s banner is red, symbolic of his physical lust.  The lady is surrounded by, is even a part of, the daisies and buttercups that surround her--flowers that symbolize capriciousness and cruelty.  Christopher Wood describes Waterhouse’s attention to crisp detail in this painting:  very small details can be seen easily, such as the rivets in the knight’s armor and the silver filigree on the lady’s arm bracelet (Olympian Dreamers 143).  Though Wood considers La Belle Dame Sans Merci to have been painted too late to be considered a Pre-Raphaelite composition, the luminous color, attention to detail, and fidelity to nature of the painting define it as being at least done in the Pre-Raphaelite style. 
The symbol of a lady’s hair as a restraint was, by 1893, common--as in Browning’s poem “Porphyria’s Lover,” written much earlier, in 1842.  When Waterhouse decided to depict this sort of scene on canvas, however, critical opinion weighed against him.  This open confrontation of the Victorian ideal of the chivalric gentleman earned Waterhouse scorn from such diverse critics as the Church of England, by way of a bishop’s letter to the Times (cf. Wood, Olympian Dreamers 86); and the Athenaeum critic, who saw the painting as too moralistic, “trying to do the work of literature, and doing it badly” (qtd. in Wood, Olympian Dreamers 86).  It is interesting that the Athenæum critic compares the didactic elements of Waterhouse’s painting to literature to point out that the painting is doing its job poorly.  Allowing paintings didactic meaning and written words decorative function is the hallmark of visuality, fully in place by 1893.  

Didactic Pre-Raphaelite Painting
Some Pre-Raphaelite paintings do not take their subjects from poetry, but rather from the social milieu of nineteenth-century Britain.  Northrop Frye and Timothy Hilton, in their treatments of the Pre-Raphaelites, use much of the evidence presented so far to hypothesize that the Pre-Raphaelites were concerned with regressive reminiscing (Frye 20-32; Hilton 109-22).  I do not wish to dismiss their arguments; the evidence in support of them is clear.  I do, however, wish to suggest that such views of the Pre-Raphaelites focus on only one aspect of their works.  
As a contrast to the four previous paintings, which take mediæval subjects, in this second set of paintings, there exists a clear record of the artists’ didactic intentions.  Indeed, when Ford Madox Brown decided to hire out a gallery and put on a one-man exhibition in 1865, the rest of the PRB joked about his straying from the didactic cause.  Dante Rossetti wrote to Brown on 6 February 1865 to offer his “help”: 

I’ve thought of an advertizing system for you which is so good you must have the benefit of it. You should begin by enormous placards with the one word work thus: 
				W
				O
				R
				K
and go on for a week or two. Then another week of 
		Mr. F. M. Brown’s
			Work
and then condescend to further particulars.
	If in addition to this you put up a sign over your door representing a Brown Mad Ox crossing a Ford marked British Art with you holding on to his horns with a palette and brushes . . . the success could no longer be dubious. (Letters 2:  542)
Rossetti slyly reminds Brown that his purpose is to move his audience, not his cash box. Rossetti had already begun painting Beata Beatrix (1864-70), which he intended to be a statement of affirmation for “personal spirituality” (Letters 2:  721). Millais’ The Vale of Rest (1859) is discussed in the P. R. B. Journal as “a new style which will eventually educate the people into taste, and make his works some day
 . . . popular and saleable” (28). 
Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853), Millais’ The Vale of Rest, Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1852-65), and Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix--each of these paintings carries a social message to its public, concerning the nature of love, sexuality, or labor. Although each of these paintings contains mediævalistic technical elements, they are primarily vehicles for social comment.  The critics of The Awakening Conscience and The Vale of Rest had little to say about the social aspect of these earlier works, preferring instead to focus on the PRB’s mediævalist subject matter and technique.  It was only with later works such as Work and Beata Beatrix that critics began to voice their feelings about the social agenda of these paintings. 

The Awakening Conscience
William Holman Hunt viewed the relationship between sexuality and spirituality differently from Rossetti.  Holman Hunt thought of his paintings as vehicles by which he could spread his message of religious piety and strict morality.  He believed that his paintings existed in a dual social dynamic:  art mirrors the actions of people, and people act upon what they see in art.  An example of his contribution to this dynamic is William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (Plate 6).  It portrays a “kept woman” at the moment she realizes the sinful nature of her ways.  She is painted as rising from the lap of her lover in repentance for her wickedness.  Christopher Wood says that this painting is one of the first Victorian paintings that explicitly deal with the problem of the kept woman (The Pre-Raphaelites 44-5).  
In The Awakening Conscience, the three basic elements of Pre-Raphaelitism--color, precise detail, and the inclusion of nature--are used to amplify the painting’s social message.  The number of colors that Holman Hunt uses is staggering.  Quentin Bell sees over fifty shades of red alone in it (67).  The minute detail of the painting reveals many symbols that reflect the woman’s thoughts.  Christopher Wood delineates the meanings of many of the symbols in the painting.  Her hair is loose, which betokens her free sexuality, as does the absence of a collar.  Aside from the exposed flesh, there are other signals:  the unraveled yarn in the lower right of the picture is symbolic of a loose woman; grapes are represented on the wallpaper, symbolic both of sin and forgiveness.  The sheet music lying on the floor is the score to a musical adaptation of Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears,” a poem which mourns an irrevocable past.  Ironically, the woman has a ring on every finger save the left ring finger, where a wedding band ought to be; the house cat has killed a small bird under the table, a traditional symbol of infidelity from mediæval times (Wood, The Pre-Raphaelites 66-7).  Holman Hunt himself adds a final touch when he explains that the flowers in the vase are lilies, for purity, and orchids, to denote sexuality and infidelity (qtd. in Wood, The Pre-Raphaelites 44).  
Nature is represented in this indoor scene through the use of the mirror behind the two principal figures, which reflects the trees and street outside the parlor.  Rich colors find expression in the tapestry, rug, and the woman’s shawl.  Holman Hunt is very conscious of the effects of sunlight and reflected light, as can be seen in the bars of sunlight on the floor, the light reflected on the woman’s face from the glass globe of the clock, and the manner in which he represents the trees in the mirror.  
Holman Hunt’s intended message to his viewers was one of repentance.  In treating such a subject openly, he hoped to expose an evil that was less than uncommon in his time.  This painting was intended to change social attitudes toward sexuality and spirituality by the very fact that it dealt openly with the subject of prostitution at all (cf. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood). 
Even though Holman Hunt painted The Awakening Conscience in an effort to teach society about the evils of infidelity and adultery, the Athenaeum critic denounced its subject matter and technique after the 1853 Academy competition, paying little attention to the intended didacticism of the work.  The critic does say that The Awakening Conscience was “drawn from a very dark and repulsive side of domestic life” (Wood, The Pre-Raphaelites 43), but spends the rest of his review in criticizing Holman Hunt’s painting technique, as we have seen happen to the earlier examples of PRB mediævalism.  The 7 May 1851 London Times also reviewed The Awakening Conscience, saying that 

[w]ith the utmost readiness to humour even the caprices of art, when they bear the stamp of originality and genius, we can extend no toleration to a mere servile imitation of the cramped style, false perspective, and crude color of remote antiquity.  (8)
	Ruskin himself wrote to the Times the next week, defending both the subject matter and Holman Hunt as appropriate to the times in which England found itself (Gaunt 111).  Ruskin’s letter, printed in the Times on 13 May 1851, also focuses on the praxis of Holman Hunt’s painting: 

These Pre-Raphaelites (I cannot compliment them on common sense in choice of a nom de guerre) do not desire nor pretend in any way to imitate antique painting, as such.  They know little of ancient paintings who suppose the works of these young artists to resemble them.  As far as I can judge of their aim--for, as I said, I do not know the men themselves--the Pre-Raphaelites intend to surrender no advantage which the knowledge or inventions of the present time can afford to their art.  They intend to return to early days in this one point only--that, as far as in them lies, they will draw either what they see, or what they suppose ought to be the actual facts of the scene they wish to represent.  (8, last emphasis mine)
Such a defense of the PRB’s methods was most accurate in describing why the members of the Brotherhood had chosen to work in their own style:  the message inherent in the scene itself--what Ruskin would have termed “truth in Nature”--is overlooked by Ruskin himself in favor of a discussion of technique.  Similarly, in the case of The Awakening Conscience, the stark reality of the depiction of the fallen woman bears the message of the canvas.  This message, however, seems to have been overlooked by the critical press, in favor of commentary of Holman Hunt’s technical flaws. 

The Vale of Rest
In addition to those of Holman Hunt, the paintings of Sir John Everett Millais often place women in positions of worship as sexual and spiritual objects.  His painting The Vale of Rest (Plate 7) strengthens the Pre-Raphaelite connection between the issues of sexuality and religion. 
Millais painted The Vale of Rest in 1859, and it earned critical praise from Ruskin (Rose 22), who also acclaimed Millais’ earlier Autumn Leaves as “the first instance existing of a perfectly painted twilight” (Ruskin, Pre-Raphaelitism 220).  This painting depicts two nuns digging a grave in a convent cemetery at dusk--hence my citation of earlier praise from Ruskin.  Millais’ composition is intensely faithful to the established Pre-Raphaelite techniques:  his colors are luminous; every part of the painting is rendered in striking detail; and there exists a meticulous fidelity to nature.  Millais uses bright yellows, reds, and blues--even though the time of day represented in the picture is twilight.  The effect of the wash-on-white technique found in many of the PRB’s works (cf. Rossetti’s Girlhood of Mary Virgin above) is especially striking in this painting because of the ethereal glow it gives to the sky and the faces of the nuns.  
The symbols in this painting, like those in The Awakening Conscience, suggest didactic lessons on religion and sexuality.  The poplar trees in the background of the picture symbolize the constancy of Nature, while the grave and the skulls on the nuns’ rosaries stand for human impermanence.  The nuns’ lack of sexuality is emphasized because their hair is covered in their habits.  The nun who is working on the grave has her arms bared, but her veil remains in place, covering her hair--a symbol of sexual repression.  
At the time of this painting’s execution, Millais was waiting for an annulment of the marriage between John Ruskin and Ruskin’s wife, Effie.  Millais eventually married the former Mrs. Ruskin, and it seems that The Vale of Rest is a commentary from Millais about the roles that both religion and sexuality ought to play in society.  Christopher Wood says that, unlike Rossetti, Millais did not place particular emphasis on the open expression of sexuality, but he did write occasionally in his letters about the unhealthiness of its repression (The Pre-Raphaelites 34).  
The figures in The Vale of Rest are interesting in that one of the nuns looks out of the space of the painting, directly at the viewer.  By including the viewer in the composition of the painting, Millais re-emphasizes his didactic purpose.  Few artists of the time, excepting portrait painters, painted figures who looked at the viewer.  George Landow interprets the message of The Vale of Rest as a simple one, which extols situational ethics.  Religion, sexuality, all human ideas and affairs end ultimately in death, says Millais, so people must choose their actions according to their own beliefs (26 ff.).  This sort of “personal morality” became popular in British society by the turn of the twentieth century, and was mirrored in large part in the popularity of paintings such as The Vale of Rest. 
By 1859, critics were beginning to warm to the idea of discussing the social agenda of paintings, but were hesitant to diminish their emphasis on works’ technique.  William Holman Hunt remembers the sort of mixed reviews that accompanied the exhibition of The Vale of Rest in 1858-9: 

[W]hen his picture of “The Vale of Rest” did not immediately find admirers and a purchaser, he was impatient, while the commentators say that in fact he had but little time to wait before the picture was sold. . . .  [However,] no public minister amidst the clamour that had been raised against our “heresy” would, however much he might have been instigated by his own taste, have had the courage to employ any one of us in public work, and Millais was never asked by any church dignitaries to paint for them.  (Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 2:  177-8)  
The “heresy” which Hunt speaks of was related to Millais’ commingling of the sacred (the nuns) and the profane (using the gravedigging as a memento mori)--a didactic issue.  The Illustrated London News, however, focused on the technical aspects of the painting in its review of 12 May 1859, saying, “There is but one question to be answered:  is the nun to be buried a young one or an old one?”  (333).  Such mixed commentary, which spans both the didactic and technical aspects of Holman Hunt’s work, illustrates the ongoing shift from visibility to visuality in the critical press. 

Work
In the face of such changing critical attitudes, Ford Madox Brown furthered the Pre-Raphaelites’ social-reform ideas in his own paintings, particularly in Work (Plate 8), which celebrates the shifting and multiplying social classes of mid-Victorian England.  In Work, Madox Brown paints not about sexuality or spirituality, but about the need for a stronger work ethic in British society.  Christopher Wood describes the process by which Madox Brown painted Work:  

Madox Brown worked for over twelve years, from 1852 to 1865, to produce Work, one of the masterpieces of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.  It is one of the most intensely symbolic of all Victorian narrative pictures, intended as a homily of praise in the virtues of work of all kinds.  The composition is crowded with figures symbolizing different classes of Victorian society, forms of work, and moralistic contrasts between labour and idleness. . . .  What he has attempted in his picture, Work, is a kind of pictorial representation of Carlyle’s social philosophy. (The Pre-Raphaelites 49)
Although older than the original Pre-Raphaelite triumvirate of Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown played an important part in bringing the technical skills of the young Rossetti to fruition.  Madox Brown was so impressed with the tenets of Pre-Raphaelitism that he soon joined the movement.  
In Work, Madox Brown uses the three basic elements of Pre-Raphaelitism to achieve his purpose.  His colors are spectacularly vivid, especially in his treatment of rich fabrics like the silken shine of a lady’s umbrella.  Nature finds a central place with the inclusion of a great maple tree amidst a large group of human figures.  “Photographic” realism is evident in every part of the painting, from the specks of concrete on a mason’s trowel in the foreground to the small-yet-legible “Money! Money! Money!” printed on a poster in the far background.  
The realistic details also serve symbolic functions that re-emphasize Madox Brown’s central point.  Each class of laborers is represented:  the working class navvies, a carpenter, the leisured classes on horseback, merchants, bankers, and the thinker Carlyle himself among this motley bunch.  Madox Brown went so far as to draw pictorial connections between the workers and those sleeping on a porch, a terrier dog eyeing a whippet (from a better class of dog, one would assume), and the posters that advertise a boys’ home, a working men’s college, a reward for information, and the cryptic “Money! Money! Money!” mentioned above.  
This Carlylean message, that work gives life a purpose, was adopted by many in British society during the last third of the nineteenth century.  It reflected the ever-changing social scene, the rise of the laboring and middle classes in the city, and the shift to the “holiness” of work as a source of spiritual value.  “Laborare est orare” (“to work is to pray”) became an often-repeated phrase from Carlyle’s Past and Present:  “Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness” (312). 
Work earned Madox Brown some criticism for his technique, and some for his message.  Many critics referred to Carlyle’s philosophy in connection with the painting (Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 2:  418-25). Robert de La Sizeranne, the noted French critic, was working in 1870 on his survey volume of English painters La Peinture Anglaise, which would be published in 1898.  He wrote to William Holman Hunt about including an article on the origins of the PRB. In the letter, he sums up part of Hunt’s previous letter: 

You have said in effect that I praise [Ford Madox Brown] a bit too much, and you have suggested that although he was nominally the master of Rossetti, he never asked to enter into the Brotherhood, and finally that his own works’ characteristics followed, and did not precede, those of the PRB--in particular Work, not begun until 1852.
(qtd. in Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 2:  422)  
La Sizeranne sums up Holman Hunt’s position in order to argue that Madox Brown did indeed “invent” the Pre-Raphaelite technique of painting.  La Sizeranne’s own position is less useful than Hunt’s emphasis of the date at which Work was begun--1852--in order to emphasize that the photo-realistic technical elements of the painting are inspired by Rossetti and not vice-versa.  
	Work shows the shift from visibility to visuality in an especially interesting way.  The critics who discuss the painting in 1870 focus on the visual, the Carlylean social message.  However, when Holman Hunt discusses the technical elements of the painting, he speaks about the earliest version of it; it was begun in a period when the discourse of visibility was dominant. 

Beata Beatrix
One of Rossetti’s paintings that mixes social purpose with mediævalism is his Beata Beatrix (1864-70).  Though this painting does not fit neatly into either of my categories (mediævalism or didacticism), I wish to focus on the critical reception of it as a didactic painting.  Although this painting is in part inspired by Dante Alighieri’s thirteenth-century poem, La Vita Nuova, its primary value lies in its function as a vehicle for Rossetti’s own ideas.  Dante Gabriel Rossetti was named for the famed Italian poet, and both Dante Rossetti and his father, Gabriele, translated many of the works of Dante into English.  Dante Gabriel Rossetti uses Dante’s life and writings as his subject in many of his paintings.  The connections between Rossetti’s life and the life of Dante are not accidental.  The things that happened to the earlier Dante seem to find counterparts in the later Dante’s mind.  Dante Rossetti wrote a sonnet in memory of his father, “Dantis Tenebræ,” in which he connects himself with the thirteenth-century Dante: 

And did’st thou know, indeed, when at the font
  Together with thy name thou gav’st me his,
  That also on thy son must Beatrice
Decline her eyes according to her wont,
Accepting me to be of those that haunt
  the vale of magical dark mysteries[?] (Works 102)
Beata Beatrix (Plate 9) is a good example of the didactic style of many of the Pre-Raphaelites’ paintings.  Much of Rossetti’s work is based on the life and writing of Dante, but his paintings are nearly always also allegories of how Rossetti himself was affected by, and attempted to shape, the society around him.  Beata Beatrix is Rossetti’s attempt to persuade his viewers to elevate Woman, in both a sexual and spiritual sense of worship.  
Beata Beatrix depicts Dante’s beloved Beatrice at the moment of her death.  Painted in warm tones, with soft and ethereal light, the painting creates a mood of spirituality.  The central figure of Beatrice is painted with her head back, eyes closed, and lips apart in joyous ecstasy.  The symbols in the painting are clear.  Beatrice is wearing a green tunic, the color of forgiveness; a haloed bird, the messenger of death, brings Beatrice a poppy, the flower of sleep.  In the background, the figures of Love and Dante gaze at each other, with the Ponte Vecchio and the Duomo silhouetted behind them, to stand for a passage to heaven.  There is a sundial in the background indicating nine o’clock, the hour of Beatrice’s death.  
There is, however, another level of symbolism in Beata Beatrix, which is more interesting in terms of its social commentary, and upon which contemporary critics chose to focus:  Beata Beatrix is also a thinly veiled memorial to Rossetti’s own Beatrice, his wife Elizabeth Siddal, who died in 1862 of an overdose of laudanum.  The figure of Beatrice is a representation of “Lizzie,” but the other elements of the painting also contribute to the allegory.  Christopher Wood interprets Beata Beatrix as a celebration of “woman”:  

His famous picture Beata Beatrix, painted in memory of Elizabeth Siddal, shows the new direction in which his art was moving.  Instead of the small, intense watercolours of the 1850s, he was now beginning to paint in oils, and on a larger scale.  Beata Beatrix was the first of the female, half-length figures that were to become the recurring theme of his art.  It has now deservedly become one of the most famous of all Pre-Raphaelite images
. . . .  In it painting and personal sorrow are combined in a uniquely powerful and intense way, and the picture vibrates with emotion.  It is impossible to stand in front of it and not be moved. . . .  He abandoned Arthurian and Tennysonian subjects.  Thereafter there was to be one subject, and one subject alone in his art--women.  (The Pre-Raphaelites 96)
In short, the focus on “woman” suggests a more open, less constricted relationship among sensuality, sexuality, and religion.  Rossetti, in effect, preaches his message of social reform through an allegorized depiction of his own personal experiences.  In doing so, Rossetti takes on the social taboos that diminish the value of sense experience.  Andrea Rose, in her book The Pre-Raphaelites, says that “in painting her in her moment of ecstasy, at the very point between life and death, Rossetti fuses the passions of the body with the passions of the spirit” (39).  The “gods” of Dante Gabriel Rossetti are made not only in the image of man, but more particularly in the shape of beautiful women.
By the time Beata Beatrix was shown to the public, the critical press was more interested in the allegory of the painting than in the techniques or subject matter employed by Rossetti in its composition.  This concentration of the critical press on the painting’s message reveals the trend toward visuality, which places emphasis on the didactic elements of painting.  Indeed, Timothy Hilton has found that the Art Magazine critic went so far as to draw the parallels between Beatrice and Lizzie Siddal:   “Beata Beatrix is a portrait of Beatrice as Miss Siddal, at the moment of her death.  She looks as if rapt in ecstasy, while the bird of Death brings her a flower for her tomb” (The Pre-Raphaelites 181-2).  This critic hints at the didactic issue of the commingling of sexuality with spirituality by using the word “rapt,” and alludes to the symbolism inherent in the figure of the bird and the flower.  This gradual critical shift from an interest in technique to an interest in message is echoed in the general reception of Pre-Raphaelite painting.  

Chapter 4

TRENDS IN CRITICAL REACTION TO PRE-RAPHAELITE PAINTING

From an analysis of the previous eight paintings, it is evident that although the Pre-Raphaelites relied upon their poet contemporaries for much of their mediæval subject matter, an equal part of their “mission” was to move the viewing public through their own depiction of then-current social matters--religion, sexuality, and the nature of labor.  The Victorian critical press initially focused their attention on the “mediæval” techniques employed by the Pre-Raphaelites, but gradually began to take more notice of the social messages in their paintings as time went on.  
For instance, the Athenaeum critic commented on Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt, Waterhouse, and Madox Brown for their innovative techniques and quaint mediævalism early in their careers.  The same magazine turned to the social agenda of Pre-Raphaelite paintings in later years.  We may most plainly see this progression by comparing early and late pieces of critical writing, beginning in 1850 and ending in 1903.  

Early Criticism Focuses on Technique
In an Athenaeum review from 1 June 1850, the Pre-Raphaelites are denounced for their innovations in technique: 

Abruptness, singularity, uncouthness, are the counters by which they play for fame.  Their trick is, to defy the principles of beauty and the recognized axioms of taste. . . .  [They] set at nought all the advanced principles of light and shade, colour and composition--these men, professing to look only to Nature in its truth and simplicity, are the slavish imitators of artistic inefficiency.  (590)
In 1851, The Athenaeum again objects to the Pre-Raphaelites’ use of detail, nature, and bright color: 

The botanical predominates altogether over the artistical--and to a viscious [sic] and mistaken extreme.  In nature there is air as well as earth--she masses and generalizes where these facsimile makers split hairs and particularize.  They [the PRB] take a branch, a flower, a blade of grass, place it close before them and closely copy it, forgetting that these objects, at the distance imagined in the picture, could by no means be seen with such hortus siccus minuteness.  (qtd. in Rose 15)
	Even the initials “PRB” were lampooned.  In accordance with the focus of the critics on the minute details of the canvases being painted by the Pre-Raphaelites, the critical press had a field day with those mysterious initials.  Some seriously took William Rossetti’s joke that they stood for “Please Ring Bell” (PRB Journal 23); others commented on the questionable masculinity of Dante Rossetti, saying that they stood for “Penis Rather Better” (Hilton 15). 
	The Illustrated London News comments in its 24 May 1851 issue on “a Pre-Raphaelite folly, by Charles Collins” (463):  Convent Thoughts (1851).  In the same review, the ILN condemns the sentiement of Millais’ Mariana (1851) as being “conveyed extravagantly in the church-window fashion of the thirteenth century” (464); Millais’ The Woodsman’s Daughter (1851) is also lampooned, the ILN critic saying that it represents “a boy, in an outrageous red dress, offering some very red strawberries to a very purpley [sic] girl, in a very green landscape” (464).  This early focus on the colors, technical details, and mediævalistic style of the PRB’s early paintings lends support to the theory of the shift from visibility to visuality, in that it does not address the didactic concerns in the Pre-Raphaelites’ paintings.
	Parody was also an effective tool for the criticism of painting technique.  There is a spoof on Convent Thoughts and Mariana (Plate 10) in the 17 May 1851 issue of Punch.  In 1857, Frederick Sandys’ cartoon, A Nightmare (Plate 12), parodied Millais’ painting Sir Isumbras at the Ford (1857, Plate 11).  Millais’ work depicts a proud old knight and two children, riding a horse through a stream.  Sandys used the composition of the painting to lampoon what he saw as the dependence of Holman Hunt and Millais on Rossetti’s techniques.  Instead of the mediæval Sir Isumbras and the two children astride a horse, A Nightmare depicts Holman Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti riding a mule.  Instead of the knight’s saddle bag, a sloshing pot of paint bangs against the mule’s flank, denoting the Pre-Raphaelite tendency to jam their pictures with color.  A peacock feather waves before the three artists, also suggesting overabundance of detail and color. 
Sir Isumbras also received the lash of the Athenæum critic’s pen in the 9 May 1857 issue--for stylistic concerns: 

[It] is monstrous, and is scarcely redeemed by glimpses and eyelet-holes of beauty.  Sir Isembras [sic] is pudgy and dwarfish; his horse is of the rare breed whilom seen on the Banbury Road, a cross between the cock-horse and the rocking horse:  if it were dotted with black wafers, the resemblance would be complete; Sir Isembras [sic] is too small or his horse is too large, that is certain; the nag is wood, board, such a horse as Troy took in, or rather that which took in Troy, rat-flanked, big-headed, long enough for a ship’s crew, and altogether such an animal as Noah would have shut the door against. . . .  Let Millais then, some day or other, step down Aldridge’s gateway, and bring up a dozen grooms, and hear their criticism.  If they approve, then let Banbury rejoice, and all critics shut their mouths and burn their pens.  (602-3)
These early criticisms center on the Pre-Raphaelites’ painting techniques, and not on the social messages of their paintings.  Later, opposition to the Pre-Raphaelites’ open treatment of the topic of human sexuality came to the forefront of critical writing about them, as discussion of their mediævalist techniques died away.  

Later Criticism Focuses on Didactic Message
The works that the PRB sent to the Paris Exhibition of 1865 “struck the French . . . as outstanding examples of general English qualities” (Bertram 31).  A review in The Athenaeum from 1866 praises the didacticism of the PRB’s paintings:  “The Pre-Raphaelite intensity of observation, whatever it loses for the viewer in its dryness, leads one to discover therein an inner and more spiritual form” (qtd. in Bertram 36, emphasis mine).  Such an emotional response to the canvases of the PRB illustrates the shift toward criticism of their didactic messages.  
Not all such criticism about the Pre-Raphaelites was positive, but the trend toward discussing their works in terms of didacticism continued.  In October 1872, Robert Buchanan wrote “The Fleshly School of Poetry” in The Contemporary Review, under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland.  This attack centered on Rossetti’s paintings, denouncing their sexual content:  as Marina Henderson states, “Sensuality, nudity, or any overt sexual reference in art was anathema in English society and Rossetti was aware that if his work was condemned on this ground he would be ruined” (15).  Rossetti shot back with his response, “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” in the 15 December 1872 issue of The Athenaeum, in which he defends his works on the grounds that the moral implications of his paintings are what redeems them from being obscene.  If we remember the critically panned sexual and spiritual worship of woman in Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, we can see just how important an issue the didactic content of Pre-Raphaelite paintings had become by 1872.  
Turn-of-the-century commentary also speaks to the PRB’s  didacticism.  In Cosmo Monkhouse’s 1899 British Contemporary Artists, the section on Millais includes an overview of Millais’ involvement with the Pre-Raphaelites.  Monkhouse uses the very terms by which I have divided the Pre-Raphaelites’ works, saying that “Rossetti was romantic, Holman Hunt didactic, and Millais mediæval” (50).  Monkhouse also praises Millais for having “outgrown” his mediævalist tendencies in favor of a more didactic tone: 

He is the great painter of the life with which they are surrounded, the masterly craftsman, who does more with one stroke of the brush than others with a dozen. . . .  But when he first came before the public, and for some years afterward, he was not in touch with his generation but was a young rebel in league with Dante Rossetti and Holman Hunt and backed up by Ruskin running counter to the prevalent theory and practice of art.  (48)
Granting such powers of social influence to the paintings produced by Millais marks Monkhouse’s commentary as being influenced by visuality; Monkhouse focuses his criticism on what he perceives to be Millais’ intent.  One final example from Ford Madox Hueffer--grandson of Ford Madox Brown--exhibits the didactic power ascribed to the works of the Pre-Raphaelites by the end of the nineteenth century: 

[O]ne of the watchers at Whistler’s bedside during that painter’s last hours has informed me that, something to the discredit of Rossetti having been uttered in conversation, Whistler opened his eyes and said:  “You must not say anything against Rossetti.  Rossetti was a king.”
	This may have been said partly to tease his listeners, whose styles of painting were anything rather than Rossettian, but Whistler certainly received nothing but kindness from the Pre-Raphaelite group. (33)
Whether this anecdote is actually true or not is debatable, but it does show that Rossetti, by the turn of the century, was known in society for his paintings, rather than for his poems.  Since the evidence thus far upholds the parallel in painting between the shift from technical to didactic criticism and the shift from visibility to visuality, I assume this is what is meant by “Rossetti’s work.”  In the next chapter, I will examine some Pre-Raphaelite poetry, including selections from Dante Rossetti, to show how the shift from visibility to visuality further explains Whistler’s alleged comment.  

Chapter 5

THE CIRCLE OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETS

Because of the Pre-Raphaelites’ early adherence to the principle of ut pictura poesis, most of the painters of the PRB also tried their hands at poetry.  Millais found that he was better suited to be a painter, and produced very little poetry.  Holman Hunt also found that his talents lay more in the way of painting, but he praised the poets whom he thought worthy of emulation in Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: 

Our newer generation had found in Keats, Wordsworth, and Coleridge the mental matter of robust honesty which Henry Taylor, Tennyson, and Browning utilised to teach the manliness and heroism of simple goodness, a basis which Chaucer and the early English poets had made as that upon which our poetry should be built.  (1:  326-27)
This is not to say that Millais and Holman Hunt gave up poetry as central to the didacticism of their works.  They merely relied more upon others’ poems instead of their own verses for the inspiration for their paintings.  

Formation of the Pre-Raphaelite “School”
Dante Rossetti, however, thought that both painting and writing were necessary to enlighten his viewers and readers.  The great theme in both Rossetti’s poetry and painting is the equation of physical and spiritual love.  Marina Henderson notes that Rossetti held that the open expression of sexuality was not something to be ashamed of, but rather a healthy way of showing a spiritual side to man’s nature (8).  His early prose story “Hand and Soul” appeared in the first volume of The Germ in January 1850.  “Hand and Soul” helps to clarify Rossetti’s ideas about the nature of the relationship between the self, the beloved, and the deity.  In “Hand and Soul,” the soul of the artist hero Chiaro appears to him in the form of a beautiful woman:  

A woman was present in his room, clad to the hands and feet with a gray and green raiment, fashioned to the time.  It seemed that the first thoughts he had ever known were given him as at first from her eyes, and he knew her hair to be the golden veil through which he beheld his dreams. . . .  As the woman stood, her speech was with Chiaro:  not, as it were, from her mouth or in his ears; but distinctly between them.  
“I am an image, Chiaro, of thine own soul within thee.  See me, and know me as I am. . . .  Chiaro, servant of God, take now thine Art unto thee, and paint me thus, as I am, to know me.” (30, 32)
Rossetti’s equation of sexual communion with spiritual fulfillment is evident in the eyes of Chiaro’s soul, wherein his thoughts reside, and in Rossetti’s persistent association of hair with sexuality.  The soul’s hair is the “golden veil through which he beheld his dreams,” which suggests that sexuality is a path to vision, as is the act of painting.  Sexuality, and art as an expression of sexuality, can lead to this ideal vision.  Couple this concept with Rossetti’s belief that the artist is socially responsible for the message in his work, and it becomes clearer that he placed such a great emphasis on symbol, color, and style in order to reinforce his social agenda, as we have seen in his painting Beata Beatrix.  
Opposite to the painters Millais and Holman Hunt, who only dabbled in verse, were the Pre-Raphaelites whose poetic talents outshone their painterly qualities.  Dante Rossetti’s sister Christina, the writer William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne--along with Dante Rossetti himself--round out the nexus of the Pre-Raphaelite “school” of poets.  
Because of the Pre-Raphaelites’ adherence to ut pictura poesis, the categories by which I have distinguished the works of the Pre-Raphaelite painters similarly divide the works of the Pre-Raphaelite poets.  Like the paintings mentioned above, the eight poems I have chosen to discuss also fall into mediævalist and didactic groupings of four.  The history of the criticism that accompanies these verses, however, runs nearly opposite to that which concerns Pre-Raphaelite paintings.  While the critics at first denounced only the techniques of the painters, and later on took up the social issues of the canvases, critical opinion of the poems begins with an examination of the didactic messages of the poems, and only later makes note of the poets’ use of technique. 

Didactic Pre-Raphaelite Poetry
Unlike the criticism of early Pre-Raphaelite painting, the reviews of earlier Pre-Raphaelite poems focus on the social repercussions of the works.  Only later in the century does the critical press really examine the mediæval structure and technical elements of Pre-Raphaelite poems.  To illustrate the didactic aspect of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, I have chosen four poems which I believe embody the social-reform spirit of the Pre-Raphaelites:  Christina Rossetti’s “Uphill” (1858), Dante Rossetti’s “Jenny” (1848), William Morris’ “The Day is Coming” (1884), and Algernon Swinburne’s “The Commonweal:  A Song for Unionists” (1886).  Each of these four poems clearly espouses a change in the reader’s attitude toward the issue at hand, whether the religious issue of salvation in “Uphill,” the socio-sexual issue of prostitution in “Jenny,” or the political issue of allegiance in “The Commonweal.” 
Even though each of these poems’ didactic intent is supported in other writings by its author, the critical press follows the trend from visibility to visuality that I have described, focusing criticism on the didacticism of the early works, while shying away from didacticism--in favor of structural and technical elements--in later criticism, even though present-day critics see these as primarily didactic poems.  

“Uphill”
	Composed in 1858 and published in 1866, Christina Rossetti’s poem “Uphill” is an exhortation to her readers to lead good Christian lives in the hope of a reward in the afterlife.  Reviews of this poem appear sporadically in American sources, like Catholic World and The Critic, but the English critical press is oddly silent on many of Christina Rossetti’s works.  Her poems, if reviewed at all, were given to women to review, and often appeared in ladies’ journals of the day, even though her poems often deal with the same sorts of isues as those of her brother Dante (cf. Complete Poems of Christina  Rossetti).  
	The Critic republishes in 1881 a portion of an 1867 Fortnightly Review article, which states that “[w]ith Miss Rossetti, the thought is generally good, always pure, and chaste, and womanly, and often, though not always, fresh and sparkling” (qtd. in The Critic 24 Sep. 1881, 257).  “Uphill,” one of three devotional poems to which the above passage applies, is critiqued according to its didactic mesage, the effect it has on its readers.  This is to be expected of a poem which appears in print in 1866, closer to the visible end of the continuum than the visual.  This is also supported by the Saturday Review article on “Uphill” republished in the September 1866 edition of The Eclectic Magazine.  The Saturday Review critic comments on the gestalt of “Uphill”: 

They [the verses] have the delicious and truly poetic effect of striking us as things overheard, as if they were the unconscious outcome of the most harmonious moods, in which a hearer is neither suspected nor wished.  (322)
Later in the review, the mediæval tone of the collection in which “Uphill” appears is criticized.  Her poetry leaves

too little for the imagination of the onlooker. The effect is like that of a mediæval picture, with its high horizons and stiff lines and general effect of nearness.  (324)
Both of these passages from The Saturday Review indicate that Christina Rossetti’s verses in “Uphill” are under scrutiny for their technical merits or faults, as well as for their mediæval tone and didactic effects.  This reinforces that by 1866, the shift toward visuality is in medias res.  Four years later in 1870, however, the trend toward visuality is well underway, as is illustrated by the criticism of Dante Rossetti’s “Jenny.” 

“Jenny”
	The version which we have of “Jenny” is much expanded and altered, both structurally and conceptually, from an early version (about 1847) now lost (Lang 500).  It was re-written in 1858-9, and again revised for publication in Rossetti’s 1870 collection Poems (Lang 500).  Not very much was said in the press about the poem, perhaps because the subject matter would still be considered mildly scandalous today:  an engaged young gentleman visits a prostitute, who falls asleep in his lap before any amorous advances can occur.  He favorably compares the prostitute Jenny to his fiancée Nell, and leaves his gold coins scattered in her hair before he leaves, nothing more accomplished than a night of musing.  The scandal, of course, is less the fact that the narrator is visiting a prostitute than the comparison of the profane lover and the sacred.  Lise Rodgers explains the contemporary reactions to “Jenny” as centered on the didactic elements of the story.  What does “Jenny” have to teach its readers?

Thomas G. Hake, for instance--Rossetti’s contemporary--defines it as a “race” between “immortal and mortal reflections,” with the immortal persisting and eventually winning. . . .  Jules Paul Siegel [sees “Jenny”] as a “dialogue of heart and head.” (Rodgers 22)
However, Rodgers is also careful to point to other instances wherein Hake discusses the paired symbols in the poem--the book of rationality and the flower of sensuality--a discussion of technical elements.  The criticism of “Jenny,” then, can be seen as bridging the gap between the visible and the visual.  Indeed, the only thing that the Old and New critic had to say in June 1870 about the poem was that it contained “realistic touches of the most earthly sort” (92), a comment which may be interpreted on either a technical or a gestalt level.  
	Algernon Swinburne comments on “Jenny” as one of the most perfect of Rossetti’s poems in “The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti” in the June 1870 issue of The Fortnightly Review: 

The clock ticking, the bird waking, the scratched pier-glass, the shaded lamp, give new relief as of very light and present sound to the spiritual side of the poem.  (571)
Swinburne then cites a passage from the poem.  A portion of that passage reads: 

Except when there may rise unsought
Haply at times a passing thought
Of the old days, which seem to be
Much older than any history
That is written in any book;
When she would lie in fields and look
Along the ground through the blown grass
And wonder where the city was,
Far out of sight, whose broil and bale
They told her for a child’s fairy tale.  (Works 73)
Swinburne’s comment on this passage illustrates the emphasis on technical matters which characterizes the emerging discourse of visuality:  “The simple sudden sound of that plain line is as great and rare a thing in the way of 
verse . . . as any man’s work can show” (571).  By the time William Morris’ “The Day is Coming” is published fourteen years later, the critical public centers its discussion squarely on the technical elements of this overtly didactic poem. 

“The Day is Coming”
William Morris’ poetry is an especially good example to use in this discussion of the critical shift from visibility to visuality because of the meta-artistic quality of his own writing.  His early works--one of which I shall examine in the next section--are almost exclusively mediæval in tone, subject matter, and structure.  However, Morris became very interested in Socialism toward the end of the century, and brought out many long pieces of doggerel verse intended to be sung at workers’ meetings (Stevenson 175).  He was engaged in writing lectures “on the social function of art and speeches on radical politics” (Stevenson 177).  In 1885, the year after “The Day is Coming” was composed, Morris helped to found the Socialist League, and became editor of its organ The Commonweal. “The Day is Coming,” a short poem which appeared in Morris’ pamphlet Chants for Socialists in 1884, espouses jingoistic patriotism and the rise of the downtrodden proletariat (Literature of England 806).  A short passage from the poem shows its simple meter and overtly didactic tone: 

It is we who must answer and hasten, and open wide   
                                           the door
For the rich man’s hurrying terror, and the slow-
                             foot hope of the poor.  
(43-44)
Such a social-reform-minded poem, it seems, ought to have been criticized for its bland tone, or radical social message.  The critics, however, chose to dissect Morris’ simple meter, image patterns, and obvious rhyme scheme (Stevenson 178)--hallmarks of the shift from visibility to visuality.  One critic from the Quarterly Review notes in January 1885 that 

the natural languor of Mr. Morris’s [sic] style makes his verse at once diffuse and tedious.  An incurable habit of gossipping causes him to loiter in his narratives, when he should be swift and stirring.  (79)
This tendency to critique the praxis of a poem characterizes visual discourse, and may also be seen in criticism of Algernon Swinbune’s “The Commonweal.”

“The Commonweal:  A Song for Unionists”
	Two years after Morris’ publication of Chants for Socialists, Swinburne came out with his own paean to the proletariat:  “The Commonweal:  A Song for Unionists.”  Both Swinburne and Morris are better known for their mediævalist works--Morris for his transliterations of the Niebelungen and Swinburne for Atalanta in Calydon, discussed below.  The critical press paid little attention to Swinburne’s social reform projects; when it did deign to review Swinburne’s later didactic works, it did so by focusing on the praxis of poems like “The Commonweal.”  The Quarterly Review notices Swinburne’s new Socialist bent, but spends much of a January 1887 article in pursuit of faulty meter and obfuscating diction: 

Every work of Mr. Swinburne’s is a succession of daring explorations in metre [sic], and this [“The Commonweal”] is no exception.  Yet neither the language . . . nor the versification . . . is a true reflection of the action or passions of the men among whom they live.  To alter the accentuation of words in common use, to speak of “rich enow” instead of “rich enough,” to call a merchant “a dromond”:  these are [glaring] examples of “poetic diction.” (83)
Just as didactic verses like “The Commonweal” are criticized for their technical content and archaic style by the end of the century, the same kind of shift can be seen when we look at some Pre-Raphaelite poems which are primarily decorative and mediæval in tone.  

Mediævalist Pre-Raphaelite Poetry
Like the group’s paintings, many of the poems produced by the Pre-Raphaelites also draw upon mediæval themes for their subject matter and technique.  A number of the poems of Dante Rossetti, for instance, rely upon a roundel stanza pattern common in fourteenth-century France (W. Rossetti, preface to D. G. Rossetti Works xxiii).  Four poems best illustrate the mediæval aspect of Pre-Raphaelite poetry.  I will examine William Morris’ “The Defense of Guenevere” (1858), Algernon Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon (1865), Christina Rossetti’s “A Royal Princess” (1851), and Dante Rossetti’s “Sister Helen” (1870).  The evidence that these four poems--especially Atalanta in Calydon--are mediæval in content and structure is at best tenuous, but I make my case for grouping these four poems together under the rubric of Mediævalism based on the archaism of their textual elements--plot, setting, and diction.  I also make this claim because the Victorial critical press treats these poems from within the didactic/mediæval continuum.
Contemporary critics, in discussing these poems, focus primarily on the didactic messages in “The Defense of Guenevere,” only turning to the technical aspects of the later poems--”A Royal Princess,” Atalanta in Calydon and “Sister Helen.”  What is most surprising about this particular critical trend is that “The Defense of Guenevere” so obviously deals with a mediæval theme, while Atalanta in Calydon is based in the Greek mythos, and is not, strictly speaking, mediæval at all--yet the critics follow the expected pattern, shifting from visibility to visuality as the century goes along. 

“The Defense of Guenevere”
William Morris’ poem “The Defense of Guenevere” is an example of early Pre-Raphaelite poetry receiving critical attention for its didactic content.  The story of the poem is obviously mediæval, yet contemporary critics saw it as the modern-day critic Ellen Sternberg does, as “an implicit statement on the tangled relationship between the artist and his audience, Art and Society” (45).  Sternberg goes further, saying that 

[b]oth the narrator and the reader [we assume] clearly approve of Guenevere, in spite of the fact that the domestic values most revered by the conventional Victorian audience--chastity, deity, responsibility, sanctity of home and family--are all defeated in the poem.  (51) 
Sternberg’s argument is an echo of what the Athenæum critic termed “The Defense of Guenevere” on 3 April 1858: 

Disposed, as we are, to recognize all who cultivate poetry honestly, whatever the style--and admitting that Mr.  Morris may be counted among that choir--we must call attention to his book of Pre-Raphaelite minstrelsy as a curiosity which shows how far affectation may mislead an earnest man towards the fog-land of Art. . . .  We shall once more be invited to accept, wrapped round with some delicate roseleaf of sophistry, or locked up in some casket of curious device the fallacy that--
    Naught is everything, and everything is naught. 
--What matter? Truth is the same, poetry undying from all time and in all ages; but masquing is not truth and the galvanism of old legend is not poetry.  (qtd. in Stevenson 175)
The length at which I have quoted this passage will be forgiven, I hope, because it contains three essential phrases which explain why the Athenæum critic dealt in visible, and not in visual, terms.  First, the critic’s use of the term “Pre-Raphaelite” itself:  in 1858, “Pre-Raphaelite” was still primarily a way to describe painting, which had yet to receive societal approval as a meaning-conveying medium.  In describing Morris’ poetry as Pre-Raphaelite in nature, the writer hints that there is no deeper meaning at all in Morris’ verses--an attack on conceptual, not technical grounds.  Second, the “delicate roseleaf of sophistry”:  this flowery (no pun intended) language boils down to another assertion that Morris’ poem is an early example of ars gratia artis, art for art’s sake.  Again, it is a criticism of the concepts involved, or not involved, in “The Defence of Guenevere.”  Last, the contrast of Truth and “masquing” draws Morris’ poetry as decorative, as opposed to didactic.  This, too, deals with the poem on the level of the visible--the written word ought to be a vehicle for a didactic message.  The present-day scholar Peter Faulkner cites The Literary Gazette’s description of “The Defence of Guenevere” as containing “loving elaboration of every minute detail” (qtd.  in Faulkner 35) and The Tablet’s statement that “the conscious rendering of the actual, in its minutests deatils, is observed . . . in the description of gestures, attitudes, features, and garments” (qtd. in Keane 75).  Both of these short excerpts are problematic, in that they focus on technical data within the poem, but they are easily explained when Keane equates these reviews by saying that “Morris’ was the first book of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, and reviewers tended to equate the poems with painting” (75).  The reviewers from The Literary Gazette and The Tablet, then, were correct in discussing the technical merits of what were, to them, word paintings.  The discourse of visibility is not weakened, but rather strengthened, by these two seemingly incongruous examples.  Algernon Swinburne’s epic poem Atalanta in Calydon contains all of the elements of mediævalism filtered through a classical Greek scenario, yet the criticism it receives is a blend of discussions of his technique and didactic intent.   

Atalanta in Calydon
The first two sentences which J. Leicester Warren writes in his Fortnightly Review discussion of Atalanta in Calydon in 1865 show the flux in which literary criticism found itself:  

Another drama of Periclean Athens in the dialect of the Thames.  Mr. Swinburne will again sing for us in these latter days the old-world story of how the whole country of Ætolia turned out, after due libations and much martial oratory, to conquer one overgrown wood-pig, and how severely the press of heroes suffered in the engagement.  (75)
The first part of this selection deals with the visual--a comment on Swinburne’s affected choice of diction for the Greek characters in his poem.  The second sentence is more visible in nature, a discussion of the social significance--actually, the lack of social significance--of the poem to the Victorian reading public.  Warren’s review exhibits both visible and visual elements because of its place in the chronology I have proposed; 1865 is close to the mid-way point between the founding of the PRB and the death of Rossetti in 1882 (Literature of England 783).  To further illustrate the mixed tone of Warren’s review, I cite his recommendations to the reading public, which also contain both visible and visual elements: 

Mr. Swinburne is too much given to comparing everything with “flames” and “flowers,” and again, “flames” with “hair. . . .”  Atalanta deserves to be read by everyone who takes an interest in contemporaneous poetry.  The blemishes are few, and the beauties are many. . . .  Even from this early effort Mr. Swinburne may claim a place among contemporaneous minor poets. . . .  (80)
Here also we can see the use of technical criticism followed by an allusion to the beneficial effects on the reading public.  Whether the laudatory tone of Warren’s review is due to the fact that Swinburne was also a critic for the Fortnightly Review at the time, Warren’s article represents the beginning of the critical shift toward visuality.  In the time between Warren’s review of Atalanta in Calydon and the publication of Christina Rossetti’s poem “A Royal Princess” in The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, we can see that the shift from visibility to visuality begins to strengthen. 

“A Royal Princess”
Although it was written in 1851, “A Royal Princess” was not published until 1866, when the critical press in England was in flux--some critics clung to the old ways, criticizing her poems for their didactic content (or lack of it), while some of the “newer” critics chose to look instead at the poetess’ meter, rhyme scheme and diction.  An example of the “old” criticism comes from The Critic, an American magazine published in New York, reputed to be one step behind the latest trends in Britain.  By 24 September 1881, when this review was published, The Critic shows its outdated style by focusing on the effect produced by “A Royal Princess”: 

[It] is far from being the best [work she has done].  It is juvenile in tone, not particularly fresh in treatment, not rich in material.  (257)
In the same review, however, there is a bit of technical criticism, as well: 

Miss Rossetti excels in these bits, but rhyme is a trouble to her, and, as often happens, she makes her labor all the more in her determination to have it. . . .  The verse is often strained and the sense mangled.  (257)
This duality of tone denotes the mid-way point in the shift from visibility to visuality.  The shift is complete by 1895, when The Critic publishes a retrospective review of Christina Rossetti’s poetic career in comparison to those of her brother Dante and Algernon Swinburne.  Indeed, it is difficult for the Critic from 12 January 1895 to speak of else but the technical aspects of the Rossettis’ poetry: 

Both [Christina and Dante Rossetti] think in sensuous, concrete images, but do not often subject them to any principles of harmony. . . .  There is a heaping-up of far-fetched images, metrical curiosities, worn-out symbols, archaic expressions, the more opposed to one another, the more welcome.  We have . . . crocodiles with fangs of gold, and “blue-black beetles” that “transact business” which, perhaps, were better described than left to be imagined.  (4) 
This critical concern for the technical elements of poetry is well entrenched by the time Christina’s brother Dante publishes Poems in 1870, in which “Sister Helen” appears.  

“Sister Helen”
	By 1870, Algernon Swinburne had become one of the regular critical contributors to the Fortnightly Review, and he made good use of this forum to praise his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the June 1870 issue.  Even Swinburne--one of the Pre-Raphaelite poets himself--was not excepted from the critical tendencies toward visuality.  His review of Rossetti’s ballad “Sister Helen” appears in “The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti”--from which I have also used Swinburne’s comments on “Jenny”--and focuses on the technical elements of Rossetti’s poem: 

There can be no pause in a ballad, and no excess; nothing that flags, nothing that overflows; there must be no waste of a word or a minute in the course of its rapid and fiery motion.  Even in our affluent ballad literature there is no more triumphant sample of the greatness that may be won by a poem on these conditions than “Sister Helen.” (506)
After this short section which sets up Swinburne’s criteria for judging the poem, he comments on the poem itself.  Note the visuality of this next passage, the focus on technique: 
The tragic music of its measure, the swift yet solemn harmonies of dialogue and burden, hold in extract the very heart of a tragedy, the burning essence distilled from “Hate born of Love, and blind as he.” [line 15]. . .  A girl forsaken by her high-born lover turns to sorcery for help in her revenge on him.  (506)
In the interest of space, I have cut much of Swinburne’s plot summary, yet that, too, can be seen as emphasis on detail and technique, because of its complexity and fidelity to even the small events in “Sister Helen” (507).  In fact, Swinburne credits “Sister Helen” as one of Rossetti’s best poems, along with “Eden Bower” and “Jenny.” (507).  If even the Pre-Raphaelites themselves showed the signs of the shift from visibility to visuality in their own critical writing, we should expect that a general survey of the trends in critical reaction to Pre-Raphaelite poetry would follow the same pattern, and indeed, it does. 

Chapter 6 

TRENDS IN CRITICAL REACTION TO PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY

The shift from visibility to visuality manifests itself in the criticism of Pre-Raphaelite poetry as a concern for the didactic content of early works which gradually becomes a concern for the technical elements of later works.  This process, which is a mirror opposite to that undergone by Pre-Raphaelite painting, illustrates how the weight given to the written word as a didactic tool is gradually shifted toward visual means of representation.  The didactic message in poetry is seen as key to critics during the early stages of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. 

Early Criticism Focuses on Didactic Message
The didactic element of Pre-Raphaelite poetry is seen in early reviews.  Later critics phase out their discussions of the social agenda of Pre-Raphaelite poetry in favor of speaking to the technical merits or deficiencies in the works, but the criticism of the early poems is very consistent in its focus on social effects.  For instance, David Masson’s review of The Germ, which appeared in the British Quarterly Review for 1 August 1852, notes with scorn that 

the thoughts of such passages as these [previous], it will be perceived, is as juvenile and immature as the writing. . . .  As might be expected, Pre-Raphaelitism expresses itself better on canvas than on paper. (Masson 212)  
It is ironic to note that the only critic who associates early Pre-Raphaelite painting with didacticism is speaking about painting fulfilling the duties which poetry ought to.  Another review of The Germ, this one from the general notices of new books in the Art Journal for March 1850, says that “there is so much of true thinking and right feeling in the various articles in this little journal; and we wish so well to its projectors that we will gladly doff the critic[‘s hat], cheering them on their path” (96).  It helps to have friends in high places:  F. G. Stephens, one of the original seven PRBs, was the art critic for the Art Journal, hence the glowing praise.  Even the Pre-Raphaelites themselves, to an extent, when they turned a meta-critical eye upon themselves, used the concepts of the discourse of visibility, as Stephens’ review illustrates. 
Another example of this critical attitude comes from Charles Dickens, who attacked the newly-formed PRB in the 15 June 1850 issue of his journal Household Words.  The article, entitled “Old Lamps for New Ones,” is a typically Dickensian long-winded set of hypothetical “what-ifs,” meant to imply the silliness of the situation under his satirical scrutiny.  Dickens spends much of the article ridiculing the painting techniques of the PRB--as we by now might expect him to do--and turns to the supposed social effects of PRB poetry, presumably from The Germ: 

In literature, a very spirited effort has been made, which is no less than the formation of a 
P. G. A. P. C. B., or Pre-Gower and Pre-Chaucer-Brotherhood, for the restoration of the ancient English style of spelling, and the weeding out from all libraries, public and private, of those and all later pretenders, particularly a person of loose character named Shakespeare.  It having been suggested, however, that this happy idea could scarcely be considered complete while the art of printing remained unmolested, another society, under the name of the Pre-Laurentius Brotherhood, has been established in connexion with it, for the abolition of all but manuscript books.  (267)
In between the bombast-laden adjectives Dickens was so fond of, we can see that his treatment of Pre-Raphaelite literary output deals with didactic effects of the consequences of the formation of his fictitious PGAPCB and PLS--again, as we expect him to do. 
	In 1866, Swinburne published Poems and Ballads, which met with mixed reviews--in the senses of both favorable/ unfavorable and visible/visual.  A Saturday Review article which is reproduced in the November 1866 issue of the Eclectic Magazine compares the previous year’s Atalanta in Calydon to the new volume of poems: 

It was too rashly said, when Atalanta in Calydon appeared, that Mr. Swinburne had drunk deep at the springs of Greek poetry, and had profoundly conceived and assimilated the divine spirit of Greek art. . . .  [T]his new volume shows with great plainness how far removed Mr. Swinburne’s tone of mind is from that of the Greek poets.  (558)
Thus far, the review sounds like an early one, using words such as “tone” and “spirit”--words which denote the discourse of visibility.  However, the review shifts in the next paragraph to a discussion of technical, visual details: 

He is like a composer who should fill his orchestra with trumpets, or a painter who should exclude every color but a blaring red, and a green as of sour fruit.  There are not twenty stanzas in the whole book which have the faintest tincture of soberness.  We are in the midst of fire and serpents, wine and ashes, blood and foam, and a hundred lurid horrors.  (558)
This second part sounds more like the discourse of visuality:  lists of details, concrete images and metaphors used to describe the particulars of Swinburne’s collection.  Again, 1866 is near the mid-point in the shift from visibility to visuality, so the Saturday Review’s discussion of both elements of Swinburne’s poetry is not surprising.  This expected criticism-in-flux leads to later criticism of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, which also follows the expected pattern:  it discusses solely the technical elements of the poetry in question. 

Later Criticism Focuses on Technique
	Criticism of later works done by the Pre-Raphaelites indeed centers on the technicalities of language, structure, and idiom.  William Morris recognized the shift in critical attitudes when he wrote in 1880 that the 

time was when the poetry resulting merely from the intense study and love of literature might have been, if not the best, yet at any rate very worthy and enduring. . . .  (Mackail 74-5)
Algernon Swinburne, whom this quotation from Morris is about, had been criticized rather harshly in the 1861 Spectator, whose critic denounced his language as “painfully distorted, vague, elliptical, and bristling with harsh words” (42).  The Athenæum critic had equally caustic words for Swinburne on 4 May 1861: 

We should have conceived it hardly possible to make the crimes of Catherine de Medici dull, however they were presented.  Mr. Swinburne, however, has done so. . . .  (595)
	Turning from Swinburne to Christina Rossetti, we find that her poetry was given to a “more delicate” critic at MacMillan’s in 1863; Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature lists the author of the review “‘The Angel in the House,’ and ‘The Goblin Market’” as “Mrs. C[aroline]. E. Norton” (1:  1128).  Regardless of this critic’s gender, she follows the trend toward visuality by quoting at length from both the Coventry Patmore poem and “Goblin Market” (399 ff.) Norton looks only at the surface story line of “Goblin Market”:  

One thing is certain; we ought not to buy fruit from goblin men. . . .  Decidedly not all the list of delicious fruits with which the volume opens shall make us waver in our resolution.  (402)
Norton’s emphasis on the “list of delicious fruits” shows that she is speaking about Christina Rossetti’s poem in light of its technical details.  The visuality we see in Norton’s criticism also appears in a later work by T. S. Eliot. 
	T. S. Eliot later comments in 1890 on Swinburne’s poetry in his book The Sacred Wood, and his words echo one set of Armstrong’s opposed poles on the continuum from 1850 to 
1900--the copy, which stands for an object, and the simulacrum, which replaces the object entirely: 

When you take to pieces any verse of Swinburne, you always find that the object was not there--only the word.  The poetry is not morbid, it is not erotic, it is not destructive.  These are adjectives which can be applied to the materials, to the human feelings, which in Swinburne’s case do not exist.  The morbidity is not of human feeling but of language. . . .  The object has ceased to exist, because the meaning is only a hallucination of meaning.  (135-6)
All of these comments on Swinburne’s later work share a visuality-influenced tone.  Each speaks of the technical merit or deficiency in Swinburne’s writing, and each omits a discussion of Swinburne’s intent or social effects.  Eliot even goes so far as to suggest that intent, didacticism itself, is no longer important; it is the simulacrum--the “hallucination of meaning”--which is the most important aspect of poetry. 
	Finally, recalling the anecdote about Whistler’s comment on Rossetti, we can now see why the “works” which someone impugned in the presence of the dying painter would almost have to have been paintings, and not poetry.  By 1903, when Whistler was said to have remarked that Rossetti was a king, the shift from visibility (in which precedence was given to the written word as a meaning-giving medium over visual data) to visuality (where images are as valid as--or, in some instances, more valid than--words for the dissemination of meaning) had already occurred.  The paintings which Rossetti produced toward the end of his lifetime were seen by Whistler, and, indeed by most contemporary critics, as socially meaningful, while Rossetti’s verses were seen as mediævalistic and quaint.  This leads me to review my argument briefly in the next chapter, and to assess the degree to which it is applicable to the case of the Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets. 

Chapter 7 

CONCLUSION

Claude Phillips, one of the art critics for The Magazine of Art, wrote a series of articles in that organ in 1894 that attempted to define the function of the art critic.  His meta-occupational musings help to shed some light on the effects which the shift to visuality had had on the way in which art critics looked at paintings: 

Whatever an artist may preach, a critic has no right to declare, as we sometimes find him doing, that such-and-such a school only is right, and that all others are wrong--that, for example, the Romantic school gives us the only true art--and decline to see what beauties there may be in the Classic. . . .  He has no more right to shut his eyes to the merits of any particular school . . . than a dramatic critic has to declare that tragedy alone is the true form of dramatic art and expression.  (118)
Phillips defines the true calling of the art critic to be interpretation of the didactic content, the symbol, the message of paintings--what he likens to the “old” way in which drama critics used to comment on literature and plays (117).  Phillips seems to have a grasp, in 1894, on the way in which criticism of didactic messages in art has shifted from literature to the visual arts.  Phillips also blames the increasing speed with which newspapers are produced for the degeneration of art criticism: 

[T]he hurry which is the inseparable and essential condition of the production of newspaper criticism nowadays often necessitates what is in truth long columns of art-reviewing and cataloguing, and not art-criticism, truly so called, at all.  (118)
In other words, Phillips recognizes that the production timetables of different media--whether photographs, paintings, or newspapers--have speeded up by the end of the nineteenth century.  Phillips speaks to what we now call “sound bite” culture:  older critical organs came out monthly or yearly, allowing for a thorough critique of technique and method, while the new weekly and daily media necessitate rush jobs that focus on the effects of painting.  Phillips thus encapsulates the shift in critical treatment of Pre-Raphaelite painting, though he does not specifically mention the PRB.  It is a shift from visibility (a critique of methods) to visuality (the effects of paintings). 

Theory of Visuality as Applicable
How does Phillips’ commentary relate to the shift from visibility to visuality which Armstrong suggests?  The visible, which I have represented as technical elements and mediæval style, is predominantly a hierarchical, logical construct; things which are visible may be tabulated, charted, listed, and indexed.  The visual, under which category I have included didacticism and social agenda, is a gestalt-driven consideration of the effect or intent of a work.  Using these definitions, it is easy to see that the early works of the Pre-Raphaelites were received in a literature-centered, visible manner:  paintings were nit-picked for technical inaccuracies or flaws, while poems were critiqued for their ultimate meanings and effects on society.  By the turn of the century, Pre-Raphaelite output was received in an iconocentric, visual way:  paintings held meaning and social influence, while the technical elements of poetry made it the nit-picked medium.  This iconocentrism is echoed in a letter to the editor of The Yellow Book for 1894, written by the artist/critic Max Beerbohm: 

It seems to be thought that criticism holds in the artistic world much the same place as, in the moral world, is held by punishment--”the vengeance taken by the majority upon such as exceed the limits of conduct imposed by that majority. . . .”  In fact, the police-constable mode of criticism is a failure.  In the old, old Quarterlies is many a slashing review . . . [that is] rowdy, venomous, and insincere. . . .  These must be judged, not by their workmanship, but by the spirit that animates them and the consequences of their efforts.  (282-3)
Beerbohm’s point is well taken, if we remember that he is writing from the newly-minted iconocentric era of visuality; criticism itself is concerned with image, with the gestalt it conveys, rather than details considered individually. 
I wish to conclude with a short section from The Pre-Raphaelites, in which Timothy Hilton almost realizes in 1970 what Claude Phillips knew in 1894.  Hilton posits that English illustration operated, prior to Rossetti,

with a bias, as is natural in a verbally sophisticated but visually undereducated nation, towards the illustration of a literary text--the painter’s art thus becoming an adjunct to something which is self-explanatory in the first place.  (50)
Hilton gets only half of the argument onto the page.  He recognizes the primacy of the written word--visibility--but does not take the necessary next step.  If paintings are adjuncts “to something which is self-explanatory in the first place,” before Rossetti, before the Pre-Raphaelites, then the post-Rossetti relationship between painting and poetry is the converse--words illustrate images that are self-explanatory in the first place--visuality.  To realize that the shift has taken place, as Phillips did, was finally to complete the dialogic relationship between the brush and the pen, the ut pictura poesis, which the Pre-Raphaelites had opened with their paintings and poems.  

Call for Further Research
Phillips also raises an issue which I have deliberately ignored throughout my present research.  Armstrong asserts that the shift from visibility to visuality was precipitated by the introduction of inexpensive ways of reproducing photographs.  This claim is very broad, but it is supported by my examination of another medium--art criticism of painting and poetry--in light of this epistemic shift.  Armstrong’s argument may, I suspect, be too far-reaching.  
Indeed, Phillips credits the shift in episteme not to the advent of photography, but to the increasing rapidity with which publications have become disseminated by 1894.  Where once critics had months or weeks to investigate works and compose arguments, by the 1890s they were lucky to have a week in which to do the same work.  Likewise, between 1850 and 1900 critical articles become shorter, allotted less and less space, probably owing to the time-crunch Phillips alludes to.  Further research is needed on this topic, if only to determine whether Armstrong’s claims are broadly applicable, or whether the introduction of cheaper photo production is one of many factors that contributed to the shift from visibility to visuality in Victorian England. 

END NOTES

Plate 1. 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  The Girlhood of Mary Virgin.
Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY. 

Plate 2. 
Photographic Study for The Girlhood 
of Mary Virgin (Rose 9).

Plate 3. 
John Everett Millais.  The Eve of Saint Agnes. 
Victoria & Albert Museum, London/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 4. 
William Holman Hunt.  The Lady of Shalott. 
Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 5. 
John William Waterhouse.  La Belle Dame Sans Merci. 
Bridgeman/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 6. 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  Beata Beatrix. 
Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 7. 
John Everett Millais.  The Vale of Rest. 
Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 8. 
William Holman Hunt.  The Awakening Conscience. 
Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 9. 
Ford Madox Brown.  Work. 
Bridgeman/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 10. 
Caricatures of Convent Thoughts and Mariana. 
(Punch, 17 May 1851 219).

Plate 11. 
John Everett Millais.  Sir Isumbras at the Ford. 
Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 12. 
Frederick Sandys.  A Nightmare. 
(Bell, Plate 37).

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