Somewhere between the Romantic Revolution and the Great Victorian Exhibition of 1851 in England, suet pudding entered the English soul, after which it became almost impossible for that country to produce a pure artist. Despite generous help from Ireland, America and even Poland, any Englishman who had been to a public school felt and looked like a perfect chump, a tourist, in the world of Flaubert and Rimbaud.

It was almost as if these schools, founded in the 1830's, had it for their main object that Shelley and Byron would never happen again….

Hence the English aesthete from the Yellow Book nineties through Bloomsbury is a sorry figure: either a thick-skinned humorless survivor (or Sitwell) or a wounded bird, limping around the wounded-bird preserve with the others. While overhead soared the inverse aesthetes or anti-artists: Kipling, W. S. Gilbert, Conan Doyle, and preeminently the author of [Leave it to...