Channels, Spring 2017

Channels • 2017 • Volume 1 • Number 2 Page 3 dandy’s beauty consists above all in an air of coldness which comes from an unshakeable determination not to be moved” (688). The Longman Anthology of British Literature notes that Browning himself was a “Byronic dandy sporting lemon-yellow gloves and gorgeous waistcoats, who loved dining out and yet kept both his private life and poetic practice out of the conversation” (1322). Thus, Browning could sympathize with the duke’s propriety and guardedness—Browning exempt himself from his critique of Victorian propriety. Yet Browning also once wrote, “Art remains the one way possible . . . [of] speaking the truth” (1324). Clearly suffering from the repressive inauthenticity of Victorian society, Browning turned to art as an antidote. I will soon show how Browning suggests in “My Last Duchess” that when the dandy encounters true, living art—the phantasmagoria of some perfect flaneur —he recoils in fear and distaste because the spiritual fullness of true art reveals to him, perhaps on an unconscious level, his own spiritual bankruptcy, hidden behind the thin veil of dandyism and the idealism of Raphaelite art. Raphael and the Pre-Raphaelites The conflict between the perfect flaneur and the dandy corresponds to the two opposing sides of the problem of Raphael: a debate central to the art and criticism of Browning’s era. Browning and the Pre-Raphaelites represent one side of the problem of Raphael. Much like Baudelaire’s perfect flaneur, Browning and the Pre-Raphaelites espoused aesthetic theories based on the assumption that the goal of the artist is to access and communicate sacred reality through ordinary human experience. According to Stephen Cheeke, in his essay “Browning, Renaissance Painting, and the Problem of Raphael,” the Pre-Raphaelite movement celebrated the “naïve traits of frank expression and unaffected grace” in the work of the early Renaissance painters (438). The nineteenth century Pre-Raphaelites offered an antithesis to the Victorian art establishment, which fell on other the side of the problem of Raphael. The mainstream Victorian art critics and connoisseurs deemed Raphael the climax and turning point of Christian art because, from Raphael forward, the artist’s supreme goal had become to capture an idealized, larger-than-life, perfect beauty (438). In language reminiscent of Baudelaire, Cheeke writes that, in the works of the nineteenth century Pre-Raphaelites, the audience encounters “the crowded human reality pressing into and against the consecrated space” (439-440). Because of their Raphaelite conception of beauty, many Victorians, including Charles Dickens, cringed at “the sense that certain things had become too visible” in John Everett Millais’ portrayal of Jesus and his family in the 1850 painting, Christ in the House of His Parents (409). But Browning aligned with Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and other artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement who insisted on the “connection between primitivism and a sacramental realism [and believed] that naivety or simplicity do not necessarily presuppose lower levels of complexity, but may offer direct routes to “reality”—including a Christian reality” (439). The ordinariness of Jesus’s life as a barefoot little boy in a dirty carpentry shed was intended to heighten, not diminish, the painting’s sacred realities. Through their aesthetics of primitivism and sacramental realism, the Pre-Raphaelites countered the decadence and prudishness of the Victorian art establishment. They also