erations was starting to break with the beginning of the decline of the bourgeoisie and its repressive ethics.

But the bourgeois readers and critics were still staunch in the defense of their morality. Their precious respectabilities were not to be violated-not even in fiction. The nastiness of sex was not to be included in the niceties of fiction. When Far from the Madding Crowd appeared (1874) in the Cornhill Magazine three readers wrote Leslie Stephen, then the editor of the periodical, in complaint against an improper passage in the novel. When The Hand of Ethelberta was to be published in the same magazine, Stephen advised Hardy not to portray a lady as amorous but as "sentimental." "Remember the country parson's daughter," he said. "I have always to remember them." The fate of Jude the Obscure has become a classic.

With Hardy, then, despite the protests against his frankness of description, the first sound of a new note was struck. While Thackeray had restricted his attacks to the fashionable vice of hypocrisy, Hardy had begun the revolt against an entire ethic. Bourgeois in his Darwinism, Hardy reflected the pessimism of a slowly passing society. Anti-bourgeois in his sex attitude, he announced the insurrection of the 90's that was to tumble the frenzied virtues of the middleclass into a cauldron of satire.

CHAPTER IX

THE IMMORAL REVOLUTION

HE break with bourgeois morals and bourgeois

THE

literature is conveniently assigned to the period of the nineties. There were isolated eddies of revolt that preceded, however, but which never became cumulative. Samuel Butler in the Way of All Flesh and Erewhon had challenged bourgeois morality with contempt and ridiculed it with laughter. The preRaphaelites in the fifties, with the publication of their magazine The Germ, of which but one hundred copies of the seven hundred printed were sold, had marked an intermediary phase between the revolt of the esthetes in the nineties and the unwavering respectability of the Victorians. The pre-Raphaelite movement was small, however, and not widely influential. Antagonistic to commercialism and contemptuous of the machine-made universe that industry had effected, it, nevertheless, did not shatter all of the moral vestiges of bourgeois artistry. Their eagerness for realism was always subordinated to a spiritual and ethical aim.

"Truthfulness in art was pursued not as an end but as a means to the achievement of a great ethical purpose."

The Puritans had declared that Art was an unclean Thing, but the developments of the latter eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had produced a prosperity that released a certain segment of the bourgeoisie from the exigent virtues of its early economics, and with that change in social situation the bourgeois attitude toward art had changed from one of denunciation to one of purification. Art was no longer viewed as unclean because it had been cleansed. The bourgeois artists had performed the ablutions! The Victorians had perfected the process. Art had become so pure that it was passionless and unreal. The pre-Raphaelites wanted to bring back realism yet not without moral distinction and purpose. Ruskin imbued them with the spiritual significance of moral dignity and stateli

ness.

"Pre-Raphaelism in itself was born of Realism. Ruskin gave it one white wing of moral purpose. The Aestheticists presented it with another, dyed all the colours of the rainbow, from the hues of medieval tapestries to that of romantic love. Thus it flew rather unevenly and came to the ground. The first Pre-Raphaelites said that you must paint your model exactly as you see it, hair for hair or leaf-spore for leaf-spore. Mr. Ruskin gave them the added canon that the subject they painted must be one of moral distinction. (Italics mine.)

Rossetti, however, despite the canons of his school contrived an exquisite unreality that glittered if it did not glow. In fact, the whole school seemed to have passion for a beauty that in itself was passionless. They were sick of industrialism, sick of the materials of a material world. It was the frills of life and not the texture in which they were interested. As Hueffer said:

"What they wanted in life was room to expand and be at ease. Thus I remember, in a sort of golden vision, Rossetti lying upon a sofa in the back studio with lighted candles at his head, while two extremely beautiful ladies dropped grapes into his mouth."

And thus these poets, amid a world saturated with hideousness and horror, sang

"of Lancelot and Guinevere, Merlin and Vivien, ballads of Stuffs and Scrips, of music and moonlight."

Yet with all of the Ruskinian emphasis upon moralism, the pre-Raphaelites did turn poetry in their bizarre, pictorial fashion, toward the fleshly and away from the spiritual. That the bourgeoisie objected is proven by the frequent attacks aimed at the school. Many parts of Rossetti's House of Life were omitted and several changed in order not to insult the public taste. The cause for the public's alarm, considered in

reference to the literature of our day, is unforgettably ridiculous. Rossetti had declared it impossible to separate earthly love from heavenly, and insisted upon viewing the body and soul of woman as one and the same entity.

"Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor

Thee from myself, neither our love from God." Such profanity of utterance was met with scathing stricture. In the Contemporary Review Rossetti was condemned as

"A full-grown man, presumably intelligent and cultivated, putting on record for other full-grown men to read, the most secret mysteries of sex connection, and that with so sickening a desire to reproduce the sensual mood, so careful a choice of epithet to convey mere animal sensation, that we shudder at the shameless nakedness." (Italics mine.)

Later, the reviewer, Robert Buchanan, then writing under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland, described the attempt of Rossetti to introduce such fleshliness as the theme of a whole poem as "simply nasty," and proceeded to quote in shocked amazement such naked atrocities of description and confession as these:

"He munched her neck with kisses, while the vine Crawled in her back...