Density, Will and Desire: Henry James, Aesthetics and the Subjective Turn

Abstract

Thus Harry Quilter, in an article titled ‘The New Renaissance; or, The Gospel of Intensity’, which closes the September 1880 issue of Macmillan’s Magazine. One month later, the first five chapters of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady open the October issue of Macmillan’s. Quilter’s article is a polemic regarding the dangerous cultural and social after-effects of pre-Raphaelitism, couched in the language of social hygiene evident in the quotation above. Ann Anderson identifies another of Quilter’s 1880 articles on aestheticism (in the Spectator) as a response to Grant Allen’s Cornhill writing on ‘home decoration’. This too, then, is clearly part of a lively contemporary debate. It is also one, unsophisticated, interjection in a discussion begun over a decade before by Pater and Arnold, one which seeks to contain and mediate those shifts in morality, culture, production and national identity which together signify modernity. How should culture be accessed and distributed among the mass of people in the modern nation? The discussion coincides, of course, with a set of political debates which, overall, seek to work out the relation between the newly significant individual and the modern state. A marked feature of this ideological ground is that the culture debate and the political debate are far more visibly interdependent than they are for us in the early twentieth century, though today the ideological residue of this nineteenth-century field remains.

pre-Raphaelitism, in its pure and original form, has passed away, its dead carcase is still left with us, and is a source of corruption which cannot be too soon fully understood.

(Quilter, 1880, p. 392)