JOHN LUCAS"beauty and sweetness," he claimed, were "essential characteristics of a
complete human perfection." 22 As R.H. Super remarks: "There was much
about Shelley's life... that was close to Arnold." Arnold's father "went up
to Oxford as an undergraduate the year after Shelley." Moreover, the
"senior dons at Oriel [College] when Arnold was a young member of
Common Room in the late forties were Shelley's contemporaries. And so
Arnold turned with some eagerness" to Dowden's biography. 23
Swinburne, too, was an Oxford poet, as was his devotee Wilde, who
studied at Magdalen College in the years following the immediate stir
caused by Robert Buchanan's 1871 attack on Rossetti, Swinburne, and
their circle. This circle, according to Buchanan, formed "a solemn league
and covenant to extol fleshliness as the distinct and supreme end of poetic
and pictorial art." 24 Buchanan's article, which first appeared in the
Contemporary Review, was expanded into a pamphlet the following year.
Rossetti replied to Buchanan, as did Swinburne. 25 Buchanan came back at
Swinburne, 26 and then in 1875 a book-length poem called Jonas Fisher was
published anonymously. Swinburne attributed this crude caricature of the
fleshly school to Buchanan, although the author was in fact James
Carnegie. In his response to what he assumed was Buchanan's work,
Swinburne called Buchanan the "'multifaced' idyllist of the gutter," 27 and
an enraged Buchanan sued Swinburne for £5,000 damages. Buchanan won
the case, although he had to make do with only £150 as well as much
adverse publicity.
Richard Ellmann does not mention the trial in his definitive biography of
Wilde. This omission is odd because Wilde must have seen the entire
episode as proof positive that true art was the enemy of bourgeois morality.
It was, of course, the first of those public confrontations that might be
called art versus the public - Whistler versus Ruskin, George Moore versus
Mudie's - that would culminate in Wilde's own trials twenty years later. It
is not that in 1875 Wilde could have anticipated this outcome. But as a
confirmed admirer of both Swinburne's Poems and Ballads and Songs
Before Sunrise (1871), he undoubtedly regarded the poet's opponents as
precisely those advocates of conventionality that it was the artist's duty to
scorn in the sacred cause of aestheticism. 28 Nor was aestheticism alone the
issue. If Poems and Ballads celebrates what John Morley in 1866 con-
demned as "libidinous song," 29 Songs Before Sunrise just as ardently extols
both atheism and Republicanism. "Hymn of Man," for example, an-
nounces exultantly: "Thou art smitten, thou God, thou art smitten; thy
death is upon thee, O Lord. / And the love-song of earth as thou diest
resounds through the winds of her wings - / Glory to Man in the highest!
for Man is the master of things" (ACS II, 104). And in "A Marching Song"
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