CHAPTER II.

THE PRE-RAPHAELITES.

MYSTICISM is the habitual condition of the human race, and in no way

an eccentric disposition of mind. A strong brain which works out every

presentation to its full clearness--a powerful will, which sustains

the toiling attention--these are rare gifts. Musing and dreaming, the

free ranging of imagination, disporting itself at its own sweet will

along the meandering pathways of association, demand less exertion, and

will therefore be widely preferred to the hard labour of observation

and intelligent judgment. Hence the consciousness of men is filled

with a vast mass of ambiguous, shadowy ideas; they see, as a rule, in

unmistakable clearness only those phenomena which are daily repeated in

their most intimate personal experience, and, among these, those only

which are the objects of their immediate needs.

Speech, that great auxiliary in the interchange of human thought,

is no unmixed benefit. It brings to the consciousness of most men

incomparably more obscurity than brightness. It enriches their memory

with auditory images, not with well-defined pictures of reality. A

word, whether written or spoken, excites a sense (sight or hearing),

and sets up an activity in the brain. True; it always arouses

presentation. A series of musical tones does the same. At an unknown

word, at ‘Abracadabra,’ at a proper name, at a tune scraped on the

fiddle, we also think of something, but it is either indefinite, or

nonsensical, or arbitrary. It is absolute waste of labour to attempt to

give a man new ideas, or to widen the circle of his positive knowledge,

by means of a word. It can never do more than awaken such ideas as he

already possesses. Ultimately everyone works only with the material for

presentation which he has acquired by attentive personal observation of

the phenomena of the universe. Nevertheless, he cannot do without the

stimulus conveyed to him by speech. The desire for knowledge, without

any hiatus, of all that is in the world, is irresistible; while the

opportunities of perception at first hand, even in the most favourable

circumstances, are limited. What we have not ourselves experienced

we let others, the dead and the living, tell us. The word must take

the place of the direct impressions of sense for us. And then it is

itself an impression of sense, and our consciousness is accustomed

to put this impression on a level with others, to estimate the idea

aroused by this word equally with those ideas which have been acquired

through the simultaneous co-operation of all the senses, through

observations, and handling on every side, through moving and lifting,

listening to, and smelling the object itself. This parity of values

is an error of thought. It is false in any case if a word do more

than call into consciousness a memory-image of a presentation, which

it has acquired through personal experience, or a concept composed of

such presentations. Nevertheless, we all of us commit this fallacy.

We forget that language was only developed by the race as a means of

communication between individuals, that it is a social function, but

not a source of knowledge. Words are in reality much more a source

of error. For a man can only actually know what he has directly

experienced and attentively observed, not what he has merely heard or

read, and what he repeats; and if he would free himself from the errors

which words have led him into, he has no other means than the increase

of his sterling representative material, through personal experience

and attentive observation. And since man is never in a position to do

this save within certain limits, everyone is condemned to carry on the

operations of his consciousness with direct presentations, and at the

same time with words. The intellectual structure which is built up with

materials of such unequal solidity reminds one of those dilapidated

Gothic churches which brainless masons used to patch up with a plaster

of soot and cheese, giving it, by means of a wash, the appearance of

stone. To the eye the frontage is irreproachable, but many parts of the

building could not for one moment resist a vigorous blow of criticism.

Many erroneous explanations of natural phenomena, the majority of false

scientific hypotheses, all religious and metaphysical systems, have

arisen in such a way that mankind, in their thoughts and opinions,

have interwoven, as equally valid components, ideas suggested by words

only, together with such as were derived from direct perception. The

words were either invented by mystics and originally indicated nothing

beyond the unbalanced condition of a weak and diseased brain, or,

whereas they at first expressed a definite, correct presentation, their

proper meaning was not caught by those who repeated them, and by them

was arbitrarily falsified, differently interpreted, or blurred. Innate

or acquired weakness of mind and ignorance lead alike to the goal of

mysticism. The brain of the ignorant elaborates presentations that are

nebulous, because they are suggested by words, not by the thing itself,

and the stimulus of a word is not strong enough to produce vigorous

action in the brain-cells; moreover, the brain of the exhausted and

degenerate elaborates nebulous presentations, because in any case it

is not in a condition to respond to a stimulus by vigorous action.

Hence ignorance is artificial weakness of mind, just as, conversely,

weakness of mind is the natural organic incapacity for knowledge.

In one part or another of his mental field of vision each of us

therefore is a mystic. From all the phenomena which he himself has not

observed, everyone forms shadowy, unstable presentations. Nevertheless,

it is easy to distinguish healthy men from those who deserve the

designation of mystic. There is a sure sign for each. The healthy man

is in a condition to obtain sharply-defined presentations from his

own immediate perceptions, and to comprehend their real connection.

The mystic, on the contrary, mixes his ambiguous, cloudy, half-formed

liminal representations with his immediate perceptions, which are

thereby disturbed and obscured. Even the most superstitious peasant

has definite presentations of his field work, of the feeding of his

cattle, and of looking after his landmark. He may believe in the

weather-witch, because he does not know how the rain comes to pass,

but he does not wait a moment for the angels to plough for him. He may

have his field blessed, because the real conditions of the thriving

or perishing of his seed are beyond his ken, but he will never so

put his trust in supernatural favour as to omit sowing his grain.

All the genuine mystic’s presentations, on the contrary, even those

of daily experience, are permeated and overgrown with that which is

incomprehensible, because it is without form. His want of attention

makes him incapable of apprehending the real connecting links between

the simplest and most obviously related phenomena, and leads him to

deduce them from one or another of the hazy, intangible presentations

wavering and wandering in his consciousness.

There is no human phenomenon in the art and poetry of the century

with whom this characteristic of the mystic so completely agrees as

with the originators and supporters of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in

England. It may be taken for granted that the history of this movement

is known--at least, in its outlines--and that it will suffice here

to recall briefly its principal features. The three painters, Dante

Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and Millais, in the year 1848, entered

into a league which was called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. After

the association was formed, the painters F. G. Stephens and James

Collinson, and the sculptor Thomas Woolner, joined it. In the spring

of 1849 they exhibited in London a number of pictures and statues, all

of which, in addition to the signature of the artist, bore the common

mark P.R.B. The result was crushing. Hitherto no hysterical fanatic

had tyrannically forced on the public a belief in the beauty of these

works, nor was it as yet under the domination of the fashion, invented

by æsthetic snobs, of considering their admiration as a mark of

distinction, and of membership of a narrow and exclusive circle of the

aristocrats of taste. Hence it confronted them without prepossession,

and found them incomprehensible and funny. The contemplation of them

roused inextinguishable laughter among the good-humoured, and wrath

among the morose, who are nettled when they think themselves made fools

of. The brotherhood did not renew their attempt; the P.R.B. exhibition

was never repeated; the league broke up of itself. Its members no

longer added the shibboleth of initials after their names. They formed

no longer a closed association, involving formal admission, but only

a loosely-knit circle, consisting of friends having tastes in common,

and who were perpetually modifying its character by their joining and

retiring. In this way it was joined by Burne Jones and Madox Brown, who

also passed for Pre-Raphaelites, although they had not belonged to the

original P.R.B. Later on the designation was extended from painters to

poets, and among the Pre-Raphaelites, in addition to D. G. Rossetti

(who soon exchanged the brush for the pen), were Algernon Charles

Swinburne and William Morris.

What are the governing thoughts and aims of the Pre-Raphaelite

movement? An Anglo-German critic of repute, F. Hüffer,[86] thinks

that he answers this question when he says: ‘I myself should call

this movement the renaissance of mediæval feeling.’ Apart from the

fact that these words signify nothing, since every man may interpret

‘mediæval feeling’ as he pleases, the reference to the Middle Ages

only emphasizes the most external accompanying circumstance of

Pre-Raphaelitism, leaving its essence entirely untouched.

It is true that the Pre-Raphaelites with both brush and pen betray a

certain, though by no means exclusive, predilection for the Middle

Ages; but the mediævalism of their poems and paintings is not

historical, but mythical, and simply denotes something outside time

and space--a time of dreams and a place of dreams, where all unreal

figures and actions may be conveniently bestowed. That they decorate

their unearthly world with some features which may remotely recall

mediævalism; that it is peopled with queens and knights, noble damozels

with coronets on their golden hair, and pages with plumed caps--these

may be accounted for by the prototypes which, perhaps unconsciously,

hover before the eyes of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Movements in art and literature do not spring up suddenly and

spontaneously. They have progenitors from whom they descend in the

natural course of generation. Pre-Raphaelitism is the grandson of

German, and a son of French, Romanticism. But in its wanderings

through the world Romanticism has suffered such alteration through

the influence of the changing opinions of the times, and the special

characteristics of various nations, that the English offspring bears

scarcely any family resemblance to its German ancestor.

German romanticism was in its origin a reaction against the spirit

of the French encyclopædists, who had held undisputed sway over the

eighteenth century. Their criticism of ancient errors, their new

systems which were to solve the riddles of the world and of the nature

of man, had at first dazzled and nearly intoxicated mankind. They could

not, however, satisfy in the long-run, for they committed a great

fault in two respects. Their knowledge of facts was insufficient to

enable them to explain the collective phenomenon of the universe, and

they looked upon man as an intellectual being. Proud of their strictly

logical and mathematical reasoning, they overlooked the fact that

this is a method of knowledge, but not knowledge itself. The logical

apparatus is a machine, which can manufacture only the material shot

into it. If the machine is not fed, it runs on empty and makes a noise,

but produces nothing. The condition of science in the eighteenth

century did not allow the encyclopædists to make advantageous use of

their logical machine. They did not take cognizance of this fact,

however, and, with their limited material and much unconscious

temerity, constructed a system which they complacently announced

as a faithful representation of the system of the universe. It was

soon discovered that the encyclopædists, for all their intellectual

arrogance, were deluding both themselves and their followers. There

were known facts which contradicted their hasty explanations, and there

was a whole range of phenomena of which their system took no account,

and failed to cover as if with too short a cloak, and which peeped out

mockingly at all the seams. Hence the philosophy of the encyclopædists

was kicked and abused, and the same faults were committed with

respect to it which it had perpetrated; the methods of intelligent

criticism were mistaken for the results obtained by them. Because

the encyclopædists, from lack of knowledge and of natural facts,

explained nature falsely and arbitrarily, those who were disappointed

and thirsting for knowledge cried out, that intelligent criticism as

such was a false method, that consistent reasoning led to nothing,

that the conclusions of the ‘Philosophy of Enlightenment’ were just as

unproven and unprovable as those of religion and metaphysics, only less

beautiful, colder, and narrower; and mankind threw itself with fervour

into all the depths of faith and superstition, where certainly the Tree

of Knowledge did not grow, but where beautiful mirages charmed the

eye, and the warm fragrant springs of all the emotions bubbled up.

And more fatal than the error of their philosophy was the false

psychology of the encyclopædists. They believed that the thoughts and

actions of men are determined by reason and the laws of consistency,

and had no inkling that the really impelling force in thought and deed

are the emotions, those disturbances elaborated in the depths of the

internal organs, and the sources of which elude consciousness, but

which suddenly burst into it like a horde of savages, not declaring

whence they come, submitting to no police regulations of a civilized

mind, and imperiously demanding lodgment. All that wide region of

organic needs and hereditary impulses, all that E. von Hartmann calls

the ‘Unconscious,’ lay hidden from the rationalists, who saw nothing

but the narrow circle of the psychic life which is illumined by the

little lamp of consciousness. Fiction which should depict mankind

according to the views of this inadequate psychology would be absurdly

untrue. It had no place for passions and follies. It saw in the world

only logical formulæ on two legs, with powdered heads and embroidered

coats of fashionable cut. The emotional nature took its revenge on this

æsthetic aberration, breaking out in ‘storm and stress,’ and in turn

attaching value only to the unconscious, the inherited impulse, and the

organic appetites, while it neglected entirely reason and will, which

are there none the less.

Mysticism, which rebelled against the application of the rationalistic

methods to explain the universe, and the _Sturm und Drang_, which

rebelled against their application to the psychical life of mankind,

were the first-fruits of romanticism, which is nothing but the union

and exaggeration of these two revolutionary movements. That it took

up with fondness the form of mediævalism was due to circumstances and

the sentiment of the age. The beginnings of romanticism coincide with

the time of the deepest humiliation of Germany, and the suffering of

young men of talent at the ignominy of foreign rule gave to the whole

content of their thought a patriotic colouring. During the Middle

Ages Germany had passed through a period of the greatest power and

intellectual florescence; those centuries which were irradiated at one

and the same time by the might of the world-empire of the Hohenstaufen,

by the splendour of the poems of the Court Minnesingers, and by the

vastness of the Gothic cathedrals, must naturally have attracted those

spirits who, filled with disgust, broke out against the intellectual

jejuneness and political abasement of the times. They fled from

Napoleon to Frederick Barbarossa, and drew refreshment with Walter von

der Vogelweide from their abhorrence of Voltaire. The foreign imitators

of the German romanticists do not know that if in their flight from

reality they come to a halt in mediævalism, they have German patriotism

as their pioneer.

The patriotic side of romanticism was, moreover, emphasized only by

the sanest talents of this tendency. In others it stands revealed most

signally as a form of the phenomenon of degeneration. The brothers

Schlegel, in their _Athenæum_, give this programme of romanticism:

‘The beginning of all poetry is to suspend the course and the laws

of rationally thinking reason, and to transport us again into the

lovely vagaries of fancy and the primitive chaos of human nature....

The freewill of the poet submits to no law.’ This is the exact mode

of thought and expression of the weak-minded, of the imbecile, whose

brain is incapable of following the phenomena of the universe with

discernment and comprehension, and who, with the self-complacency which

characterizes the weak-minded, proclaims his infirmity as an advantage,

and declares that his muddled thought, the product of uncontrolled

association, is alone exact and commendable, boasting of that for which

the sane-minded are pitying him. Besides the unregulated association

of ideas there appears in most romanticists its natural concomitant,

mysticism. That which enchanted them in the idea of the Middle Ages

was not the vastness and might of the German Empire, not the fulness

and beauty of the German life of that period, but Catholicism with its

belief in miracles and its worship of saints. ‘Our Divine Service,’

writes H. von Kleist, ‘is nothing of the kind. It appeals only to cold

reason. A Catholic feast appeals profoundly to all the senses.’ The

obscure symbolism of Catholicism, all the externals of its priestly

motions, all its altar service so full of mystery, all the magnificence

of its vestments, sacerdotal vessels and works of art, the overwhelming

effect of the thunder of the organ, the fumes of incense, the flashing

monstrance--all these undoubtedly stir more confused and ambiguous

adumbrations of ideas than does austere Protestantism. The conversion

of Friedrich Schlegel, Adam Müller, Zacharias Werner, Count Stolberg,

to Catholicism is just as consistent a result as, to the reader who

has followed the arguments on the psychology of mysticism, it is

intelligible that, with these romanticists, the ebullitions of piety

are accompanied by a sensuousness which often amounts to lasciviousness.

Romanticism penetrated into France a generation later than into

Germany. The delay is easy of historical explanation. In the storms

of the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the leading minds of

the French people had no time to think of themselves. They had no

leisure for testing the philosophy of their encyclopædists, to find

it inadequate, reject it, and rise up against it. They devoted their

whole energy to rough, big, muscular deeds of war, and the need for

the emotional exercise afforded by art and poetry, asserted itself

but feebly, being completely satisfied by the far stronger emotions of

self-love and despair produced by their famous battles and cataclysmic

overthrows. Æsthetic tendencies only reasserted their rights during

the half-dormant period following the battle of Waterloo, and then the

same causes led to the same results as in Germany. The younger spirits

in this case also raised the flag of revolt against the dominating

æsthetic and philosophic tendencies. They wished Imagination to grapple

with Reason, and place its foot on its neck, and they proclaimed the

martial law of passion against the sober procedure of discipline and

morality. Through Madame de Staël and A. W. Schlegel, partly by the

latter’s personal intercourse with Frenchmen, and partly by his works,

which were soon translated into French, they were in some measure

made acquainted with the German movement. They joined it perhaps half

unconsciously. Of the many impulses which were active among the German

romanticists, patriotism and Catholic mysticism had no influence on

the French mind, which only lent itself to the predilection for what

was remote in time and space, and what was free from moral and mental

restraints.

French romanticism was neither mediæval nor pious. It took up its abode

rather in the Renaissance period as regards remoteness in time, and in

the East or the realms of faerie, if it wished to be spacially remote

from reality. In Victor Hugo’s works the one drama of _Les Burgraves_

takes place in the thirteenth century; but in all the others,

_Cromwell_, _Maria Tudor_, _Lucrezia Borgia_, _Angelo_, _Ruy Blas_,

_Hernani_, _Marion Delorme_, _Le Roi s’amuse_, the scenes were laid in

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and his one mediæval romance,

_Notre Dame de Paris_, can be set over against all the rest, from _Han

d’Islande_, which has for its scene of action a fancied Thule, to _Les

Miserables_ and _1793_, which take place in an apocalyptic Paris and

in a history of the Revolution suited to the use of hashish-smokers.

The bent of French romanticism towards the Renaissance is natural. That

was the period of great passions and great crimes, of marble palaces,

of dresses glittering with gold, and of intoxicating revels; a period

in which the æsthetic prevailed over the useful, and the fantastic

over the rational, and when crime itself was beautiful, because

assassination was accomplished with a chased and damascened poniard,

and the poison was handed in goblets wrought by Benvenuto Cellini.

The French romanticists made use of the unreality of their scene

of action and costumes chiefly for the purpose of enabling them,

without restraint, to attribute to their characters all the qualities,

exaggerated even to monstrosity, that were dear to the French, not

yet ailing with the pain of overthrow. Thus in the heroes of Victor

Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, we become

acquainted with the French ideal of man and woman. The subtle inquiries

of Faust, the soliloquies of Hamlet, are not their affair. They talk

unceasingly in dazzling witticisms and antitheses; they fight one

against ten; they love like Hercules in the Thespidian night, and

their whole life is one riot of fighting, wantoning, wine, perfume,

and pageantry--a sort of magnificent illusion, with performance of

gladiators, Don Juans, and Monte Christos; a crazy prodigality of

inexhaustible treasures of bodily strength, gaiety and gold. These

ideal beings had necessarily to wear doublets or Spanish mantles,

and speak in the tongues of unknown times, because the tightness of

the contemporary dress-coat could not accommodate all this wealth of

muscle, and the conversation of the Paris salon did not admit of the

candour of souls which their authors had turned inside out.

The fate of romanticism in England was exactly the reverse of that

which befell it in France. Whereas the French had imitated chiefly, and

even exclusively, in the German romanticists, their divergence from

reality, and their declaration of the sovereign rights of the passions,

the English just as exclusively elaborated their Catholic and mystical

elements. For them the Middle Ages had a powerful attraction, inasmuch

as it was the period of childlike faith in the letter, and of the

revelling of simple piety in personal intercourse with the Trinity, the

Blessed Virgin, and all the guardian saints.

Trade, industry, and civilization were nowhere in the world so much

developed as in England. Nowhere did men work so assiduously, nowhere

did they live under such artificial conditions as there. Hence the

state of degeneration and exhaustion, which we observe to-day in all

civilized countries as the result of this over-exertion, must of

necessity have shown itself sooner in England than elsewhere, and, as a

matter of fact, did show itself in the third and fourth decade of the

century with continually increasing violence. In consequence, however,

of the peculiarity of the English mind, the emotional factor in

degeneration and exhaustion necessarily assumed with them a religious

colouring.

The Anglo-Saxon race is by nature healthy and strong-minded. It has

therefore, in a high degree, that strong desire for knowledge which

is peculiar to normally-constituted persons. In every age it has

inquired into the why and how of phenomena, and shown passionate

sympathy with, and gratitude to, everyone who held out hopes of an

explanation of them. The well-known and deeply thoughtful discourse

of the Anglican noble concerning what precedes and follows man’s

life--a speech which Bede has preserved for us in his account of the

conversion of Edwin to Christianity--has been cited by all authors

(_e.g._, by G. Freytag and H. Taine[87]) who have studied the origins

of the English mental constitution. It shows that as early as the

beginning of the seventh century the Anglo-Saxons were consumed

by an ardent desire to comprehend the phenomenon of the universe.

This fine and high-minded craving for knowledge has proved at once

the strength and the weakness of the English. It led with them to

the development along parallel lines of the natural sciences and

theology. The scientific investigators contributed a store of facts

won through toilsome observation; the experts in divinity obtained

theirs through systems compounded of notions arbitrarily conceived.

Both claimed to explain the nature of things, and the people were

deeply grateful to both, more so, it is true, to the theologians than

to the scholars, because the former could afford to be more copious

and confident in their teaching than the latter. The natural tendency

to reckon words as equivalent to facts, assertions to demonstrations,

always gives theologians and metaphysicians an immense advantage over

observers. The craving of the English for knowledge has produced both

the philosophy of induction and spiritualism. Humanity owes to them

on the one hand Francis Bacon, Harvey, Newton, Locke, Darwin, J.

S. Mill; on the other, Bunyan, Berkeley, Milton, the Puritans, the

Quakers, and all the religious enthusiasts, visionaries, and mediums

of this century. No people has done so much for, and conferred such

honour on, scientific investigators; no people has sought with so much

earnestness and devotion for instruction, especially in matters of

faith, as have the English. Eagerness to know is, therefore, the main

source of English religiousness. There is this also to be noticed, that

among them the ruling classes never gave an example of indifference

in matters of faith, but systematically made religiousness a mark of

social distinction; unlike France, where the nobility of the eighteenth

century exalted Voltairianism into a symptom of good breeding. The

evolution of history led in England to two results which apparently

exclude each other--to caste-rule, and the liberty of the individual.

The caste which is in possession of wealth and power naturally wishes

to protect its possessions. The rigid independence of the English

people precludes it from applying physical force. Hence it uses moral

restraints to keep the lower ranks submissive and amenable, and, among

these, religion is by far the most effective.

Herein lies the explanation both of the devoutness of the English and

of the religious character of their mental degeneration. The first

result of the epidemic of degeneration and hysteria was the Oxford

Movement in the thirties and forties. Wiseman turned all the weaker

heads. Newman went over to Catholicism. Pusey clothed the entire

Established Church in Romish garb. Spiritualism soon followed, and

it is worthy of remark that all mediums adopted theological modes of

speech, and that their disclosures were concerned with heaven and

hell. The ‘revival meetings’ of the seventies, and the Salvation Army

of to-day, are the direct sequel of the Oxford stream of thought, but

rendered turbid and foul in accordance with the lower intellectual

grade of their adherents. In the world of art, however, the religious

enthusiasm of degenerate and hysterical Englishmen sought its

expression in pre-Raphaelitism.

An accurate definition of the connotation of this word is an

impossibility, in that it was invented by mystics, and is as vague and

equivocal as are all new word-creations of the feeble and deranged

in mind. The first members of the Brotherhood believed that, in the

artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the predecessors

of the great geniuses of the Umbrian and Venetian schools, they

had discovered minds congenial to their own. For a short time they

took the methods of these painters for their models, and created

the designation ‘pre-Raphaelite.’ The term was bound to approve

itself to them, since the prefix ‘pre’ (‘præ’) arouses ideas of the

primeval, the far-away, the hardly perceptible, the mysteriously

shadowy. ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ calls up, through association of ideas,

‘pre-Adamite,’[88] ‘prehistoric,’ etc.--in short, all that is opened

to view by immeasurable vistas down the dusk of the unknown, and which

allow the mind to wander dreamily beyond the limits of time and in the

realms of myth. But that the pre-Raphaelites should have lit on the

quattrocento painters for the embodiment of their artistic ideals is

due to John Ruskin.

Ruskin is one of the most turbid and fallacious minds, and one of the

most powerful masters of style, of the present century. To the service

of the most wildly eccentric thoughts he brings the acerbity of a

bigot and the deep sentiment of Morel’s ‘emotionalists.’ His mental

temperament is that of the first Spanish Grand Inquisitors. He is a

Torquemada of æsthetics. He would liefest burn alive the critic who

disagrees with him, or the dull Philistine who passes by works of art

without a feeling of devout awe. Since, however, stakes do not stand

within his reach, he can at least rave and rage in word, and annihilate

the heretic figuratively by abuse and cursing. To his ungovernable

irascibility he unites great knowledge of all the minutiæ in the

history of art. If he writes of the shapes of clouds he reproduces the

clouds in seventy or eighty existing pictures, scattered amongst all

the collections of Europe. And be it noted that he did this in the

forties, when photographs of the masterpieces of art, which render

the comparative study of them to-day so convenient, were yet unknown.

This heaping up of fact, this toilsome erudition, made him conqueror

of the English intellect, and explains the powerful influence which he

obtained over artistic sentiment and the theoretic views concerning

the beautiful of the Anglo-Saxon world. The clear positivism of the

Englishman demands exact data, measures, and figures. Supplied with

these he is content, and does not criticise starting-points. The

Englishman accepts a fit of delirium if it appears with footnotes,

and is conquered by an absurdity if it is accompanied by diagrams.

Milton’s description of hell and its inhabitants is as detailed and

conscientious as that of a land-surveyor or a natural philosopher,

and Bunyan depicts the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ to the mystical kingdom

of Redemption in the method of the most graphic writer of travels--a

Captain Cook or a Burton. Ruskin has in the highest conceivable degree

this English peculiarity of exactness applied to the nonsensical, and

of its measuring and counting applied to fevered visions.

In the year 1843, almost simultaneously with the outbreak of the great

Catholicizing movement, Ruskin began to publish the feverish studies

on art which were subsequently collected under the title of _Modern

Painters_. He was then a young divinity student, and as such he entered

upon the study of works of art. The old scholasticism wished to make

philosophy the ‘handmaid of godly learning.’ Ruskin’s mysticism had

the same purpose with regard to art. Painting and sculpture ought to

be a form of divine worship, or they ought not to exist at all. Works

of art were valuable merely for the supersensuous thoughts that they

conveyed, for the devotion with which they were conceived and which

they revealed, not for the mastery of form.

From this point of view he was able to arrive at judgments among

which I here quote a few of the most typical. ‘It appears to me,’ he

says,[89] ‘that a rude symbol is oftener more efficient than a refined

one in touching the heart, and that as pictures rise in rank as works

of art they are regarded with less devotion and more curiosity.... It

is man and his fancies, man and his trickeries, man and his inventions,

poor, paltry, weak, self-sighted man, which the connoisseur for ever

seeks and worships. Among potsherds and dunghills, among drunken

boors and withered beldames, through every scene of debauchery and

degradation, we follow the erring artist, not to receive one wholesome

lesson, not to be touched with pity, nor moved with indignation, but

to watch the dexterity of the pencil, and gloat over the glittering of

the hue.... Painting is nothing but a noble and expressive language,

invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.... It is

not by the mode of representing and saying, but by what is represented

and said, that the respective greatness either of the painter or the

writer is to be finally determined.... The early efforts of Cimabue

and Giotto are the burning messages of prophecy, delivered by the

stammering lips of infants.... The picture which has the nobler and

more numerous ideas, however awkwardly expressed, is a greater and a

better picture than that which has the less noble and less numerous

ideas, however beautifully expressed.... The less sufficient the means

appear to the end the greater will be the sensation of power.’ These

propositions were decisive in determining the direction taken by

the young Englishmen of 1843, who united artistic inclinations with

the mysticism of the degenerate and hysterical. They comprise the

æstheticism of the first pre-Raphaelites, who felt that Ruskin had

expressed with clearness what was vaguely fermenting within them. Here

was the art-ideal which they had presaged--form as indifferent, idea

as everything; the clumsier the representation, the deeper its effect;

the devotion of faith as the only worthy import of a work of art. They

reviewed the history of art for phenomena agreeing with the theories

of Ruskin, which they had taken up with enthusiasm, and they found

what they sought in the archaic Italian school, in which the London

National Gallery is extraordinarily rich. There they had perfect models

to imitate; they were bound to take for their starting-point these Fra

Angelicos, Giottos, Cimabues, these Ghirlandajos and Pollajuolos. Here

were paintings bad in drawing, faded or smoked, their colouring either

originally feeble or impaired by the action of centuries; pictures

executed with the awkwardness of a learner representing events in the

Passion of Christ, in the life of the Blessed Virgin, or in the Golden

Legend, symbolizing childish ideas of hell and paradise, and telling of

earnest faith and fervent devotion. They were easy of imitation, since,

in painting pictures in the style of the early masters, faulty drawing,

deficient sense of colour, and general artistic incapacity, are so many

advantages. And they constituted a sufficiently forcible antithesis

to all the claims of the artistic taste of that decade to satisfy

the proclivity for contradiction, paradox, negation and eccentricity

which we have learned to recognise as a special characteristic of the

feeble-minded.

Ruskin’s theory is in itself delirious. It mistakes the fundamental

principles of æsthetics, and, with the unconsciousness of a saucy child

at play, muddles and entangles the boundary lines of the different

arts. It holds of account in plastic art only the conception. A

picture is valuable only in so far as it is a symbol giving expression

to a religious idea. Ruskin does not take into consideration, or

deliberately overlooks the fact, that the pleasurable feelings which

are produced by the contemplation of a picture are not aroused by

its intellectual import, but by it as a sensuous phenomenon. The art

of painting awakens through its media of colour and drawing (_i.e._,

the exact grasp and reproduction of differences in the intensity of

light), firstly, a purely sensuously agreeable impression of beautiful

single colours and happily combined harmonies of colour; secondly, it

produces an illusion of reality and, together with this, the higher,

more intellectual pleasures arising from a recognition of the phenomena

depicted, and from a comprehension of the artist’s intention; thirdly,

it shows these phenomena as seen with the eye of the artist, and brings

out details or collective traits, which until then the inartistic

beholder had not been by himself able to perceive. The painter

therefore influences, through the medium of his art, only so far as he

agreeably excites the sense of colour, gives to the mind an illusion of

reality, together with the consciousness that it is an illusion, and,

through his deeper, more penetrating vision, discloses to the spectator

the hidden treasures of the phenomenal world. If, in addition to the

presentation of the picture, ‘its story’ also affects the beholder,

it is no longer the merit of the painter as such, but of his not

exclusively pictorial intelligence in making choice of a subject, and

in committing its portrayal to his specific pictorial abilities. The

effect of the story is not called forth through the media of painting;

it is not based on the pleasure of the spectator in colour, on the

illusion of reality, or on a better grasp of the phenomenon, but on

some pre-existing inclination, some memory, some prejudice. A purely

painter’s picture, such as Leonardo’s _Mona Lisa_, charms everyone

whose eye has been sufficiently trained. A picture which tells a story,

but is not distinguished for its purely pictorial qualities, leaves

everyone unappreciative to whom the story in itself is uninteresting,

_i.e._, to whom it would in any case have been uninteresting, had it

not been executed by the instrumentality of pictorial art, but simply

narrated. A Russian eikon affects a moujik, and leaves the Western art

connoisseur cold. A painting which represents a French victory over

Russian troops would excite and please a French Philistine, even if

it were painted in the style of an Épinal. It is true, no doubt, that

there is a sort of painting which does not seek to seize and awaken

visual impressions in the spectator, together with the emotions which

they directly arouse, but to express ideas, and in which the picture is

intended to affect the mind, not by itself and its own consummate art,

but by its spiritual significance. But this kind of painting has a

special name: we call it writing. The signs, which are meant to have no

pictorial, but only symbolic value, where we turn away from the form in

order to dwell upon their meaning, we call ‘letters,’ and the art which

makes use of such symbols for the expression of mental processes is not

painting, but poetry. Originally, pictures were actually, no doubt,

a means of symbolizing thoughts, and their value as things of beauty

was considered of secondary importance in relation to their value as

means of expression. On the other hand, æsthetic impressions still play

in these days a subdued accompaniment to our writing, and a beautiful

handwriting, quite apart from its import, affects us more agreeably

than one that is ugly. At the very beginning of their evolution,

however, the kind of painting which satisfied only æsthetic needs

separated itself from that of writing, which serves to render ideas

perceptible to the senses. Descriptive drawing became the hieroglyph,

the demotic writing, the letter; and it was reserved for Ruskin to be

the first to try to annul a distinction which the scribes of Thebes had

learnt to make six thousand years before him.

The pre-Raphaelites, who got all their leading principles from Ruskin,

went further. They misunderstood his misunderstandings. He had simply

said that defectiveness in form can be counter-balanced by devotion and

noble feeling in the artist. They, however, raised it to the position

of a fundamental principle, that in order to express devotion and noble

feeling, the artist must be defective in form. Incapable, like all the

weak-minded, of observing any process and of giving a clear account

of it to themselves, they did not distinguish the real causes of the

influence exercised over them by the old masters. The pictures touched

and moved them; the most striking distinction between such pictures and

others, to which they were indifferent, was their awkward stiffness;

they did not look further, however, than this awkward stiffness for the

source of what touched and moved them, and imitated with great care and

conscientiousness the bad drawing of the old masters.

Now, the clumsiness of the old masters is certainly touching; but

why? Because these Cimabues and Giottos were sincere. They wished to

get closer to nature, and to free themselves from the thraldom of the

Byzantine school, which had become entirely unreal. They struggled with

vehement endeavour against the bad habits of hand and eye which they

had acquired from the teachers of their guilds, and the spectacle of

such a conflict, like every violent effort of an individuality which

sets itself to rend fetters of any sort and save its own soul from

bondage, is the most attractive thing possible to observe. The whole

difference between the old masters and the pre-Raphaelites is, that

the former had first to find out how to draw and paint correctly, while

the latter wished to forget it. Hence, where the former fascinate, the

latter must repel. It is the contrast between the first babbling of a

thriving infant and the stammering of a mentally enfeebled gray-beard;

between childlike and childish. But this retrogression to first

beginnings, this affectation of simplicity, this child’s play in word

and gesture, is a frequent phenomenon amongst the weak-minded, and we

shall often meet with it among the mystic poets.

According to the doctrine of their master in theory, Ruskin, the

decline of art for pre-Raphaelites begins with Raphael--and for

obvious reasons. To copy Cimabue and Giotto is comparatively easy.

In order to imitate Raphael it is necessary to be able to draw and

paint to perfection, and this was just what the first members of the

Brotherhood could not do. Moreover, Raphael lived in the most glorious

period of the Renaissance. The rosy dawn of the New Thought shone in

his being and his work. With the liberal-mindedness of an enlightened

Cinquecentist, he no longer painted only religious subjects, but

mythological and historical, or, as the mystics say, profane, subjects

as well. His paintings appealed not only to the devotion of faith, but

also to the sense of beauty. They are no longer exclusively divine

worship; consequently, as Ruskin says, and his disciples repeat,

they are devil-worship, and therefore to be rejected. Finally, it is

consistent with the tendency to contradiction, and to the repudiation

of what is manifest, which governs the thoughts of the weak-minded,

that they should declare as false those tenets in the history of art

which others than themselves deemed the most incontestable. The whole

world for three hundred years had said, ‘Raphael is the zenith of

painting.’ To this they replied, ‘Raphael is the nadir of painting.’

Hence it came about that, in the designation which they appropriated,

they took up a direct allusion to Raphael, and to no other master or

other portion of the history of art.

Consistency of sequence and unity are not to be expected from mystical

thought. It proceeds after its kind in perpetual self-contradiction. In

one place Ruskin says:[90] ‘The cause of the evil lies in the painter’s

taking upon him to modify God’s works at his pleasure, casting the

shadow of himself on all he sees. Every alteration of the features of

nature has its origin either in powerless indolence or blind audacity.’

Thus the painter should reproduce the phenomenon exactly as he sees it,

and not suffer himself to make the smallest alteration in it. And a few

pages further on:[91] ‘There is an ideal form of every herb, flower,

and tree; it is that form to which every individual of the species

has a tendency to attain, freed from the influence of accident or

disease.’ And, he continues, to recognise and to reproduce this ideal

form is the one great task of the painter.

That one of these propositions completely nullifies the other it is

hardly necessary to indicate. The ‘ideal form’ which every phenomenon

strives after does not stand before the bodily eyes of the painter. He

reads it, according to some preconceived notion, into the phenomenon.

He has to deal with individual forms which, through ‘accident or

disease,’ have diverged from the ‘ideal form.’ In order to bring them

back in painting to their ideal form, he must alter the object given

by nature. Ruskin demands that he should do this, but at the same time

says that every alteration is an act of ‘powerless indolence or blind

audacity.’ Naturally, only one of these mutually exclusive statements

can be true. Unquestionably it is the former. The ‘ideal form’ is an

assumption, not a perception. The separation of the essential from the

accidental, in the phenomenon, is an abstraction--the work of reason,

not of the eye or æsthetic emotion. Now, the subject-matter of painting

is the visible, not the conjectural; the real, not the possible or

probable; the concrete, not the abstract. To exclude individual

features from a phenomenon as unessential and accidental, and to retain

others as intrinsic and necessary, is to reduce it to an abstract idea.

The work of art, however, is not to abstract, but to individualize.

Firstly, because abstraction presupposes an idea of the law which

determines the phenomenon, because this idea may be erroneous, because

it changes with the ruling scientific theories of the day, whereas

the painter does not reproduce changing scientific theories, but

impressions of sense. Secondly, because the abstraction rouses the

working of thought, and not emotion, while the task of art is to excite

emotion.

Nevertheless, the pre-Raphaelites had no eye for these contradictions,

and followed blindly all Ruskin’s injunctions. They typified the human

form, but they rendered all accessories truthfully, and had neither

‘the blind audacity nor powerless indolence’ to change any of them.

They painted with the greatest precision the landscape in which their

figures stood, and the objects with which they were surrounded. The

botanist can determine every kind of grass and flower painted; the

cabinet-maker can recognise the joining and glueing in every footstool,

the kind of wood and varnish in the furniture. Moreover, this

conscientious distinctness is just the same in the foreground as in

the extreme background, where, according to the laws of optics, things

should be scarcely perceptible.

This uniformly clear reproduction of all the phenomena in the field of

vision is the pictorial expression of the incapacity for attention. In

intellection, attention suppresses a portion of that which is presented

to consciousness (through association or perception), and suffers

only a dominant group of the latter to remain. In sight, attention

suppresses a portion of the phenomena in the field of vision in order

distinctly to perceive only that part which the eye can focus. To look

at a thing is to see one object intently, and to disregard others. The

painter must observe if he wishes to make clear to us what phenomenon

has engrossed him, and what his picture is to show us. If he does

not dwell observantly on a definite point in the field of vision,

but represents the whole field of view with the same proportion of

intensity, we cannot divine what he wishes particularly to tell us, and

on what he wishes to direct our attention. Such a style of painting may

be compared to the disconnected speech of a weak mind, who chatters

according to the current of the association of ideas, wanders in his

talk, and neither knows himself what he wishes to arrive at, nor is

able to make it clear to us; it is painted drivelling, echolalia of the

brush.

But it is just this manner of painting which has gained for itself an

influence on contemporary art. It is the pre-Raphaelite contribution to

its evolution. The non-mystical painters have also learnt to observe

accessories with precision, and to reproduce them faithfully; but

they have prudently avoided falling into the faults of their models,

and nullifying the unity of their work by filling the most distant

backgrounds with still life, painted with painful accuracy. The lawns,

flowers and trees, which they render with botanical accuracy, the

geologically correct rocks, surfaces of soil, and mountain structures,

the distinct patterns of carpets and wall-papers, which we find in the

new pictures, are traceable to Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelites.

These mystics believed themselves to be mentally affiliated with the

Old Masters, because, like the latter, they painted religious pictures.

But in this they deceive themselves. Cimabue, Giotto and Fra Angelico

were no mystics, or, to put it more precisely, they are to be classed

as mystics because of their ignorance, and not because of organic

weakness of mind. The mediæval painter, who depicted a religious

scene, was convinced that he was painting something perfectly true.

An Annunciation, a Resurrection, an Ascension, an event in the lives

of the saints, a scene of life in paradise or in hell, possessed for

him the same incontestable character of reality as drinking bouts in

a soldier’s tavern, or a banquet in a ducal palace. He was a realist

when he was painting the transcendental. To him the legend of his faith

was related as a fact; he was penetrated with a sense of its literal

truth, and reproduced it exactly as he would have done any other true

story. The spectator approached the picture with the same conviction.

Religious art was the Bible of the poor. It had for the mediæval man

the same importance as the illustrations in the works on the history of

civilization, and on natural science, have in our day. Its duty was to

narrate and to teach, and hence it had to be exact. We know from the

touching stanza of Villon[92] how the illiterate people of the Middle

Ages regarded church pictures. The dissolute poet makes his mother say

to the Virgin Mary:

‘A pitiful poor woman, shrunk and old,

I am, and nothing learn’d in letter-lore;

Within my parish-cloister I behold

A painted Heaven where harps and lutes adore,

And eke an Hell whose damned folk seethe full sore:

One bringeth fear, the other joy to me.

That joy, great Goddess, make thou mine to be--

Thou of whom all must ask it even as I;

And that which faith desires, that let it see,

For in this faith I choose to live and die.’

With this sober faith a mystic mode of painting would be quite

incompatible. The painter then avoided all that was obscure or

mysterious; he did not paint nebulous dreams and moods, but positive

records. He had to convince others, and could do so, because he was

convinced himself.

It was quite otherwise with the pre-Raphaelites. They did not paint

sober visions, but emotions. They therefore introduced into their

pictures mysterious allusions and obscure symbols, which have nothing

to do with the reproduction of visible reality. I need cite only one

example--Holman Hunt’s _Shadow of the Cross_. In this picture Christ

is standing in the Oriental attitude of prayer with outstretched arms,

and the shadow of his body, falling on the ground, shows the form of

a cross. Here we have a most instructive pattern of the processes of

mystic thought. Holman Hunt imagines Christ in prayer. Through the

association of ideas there awakes in him simultaneously the mental

image of Christ’s subsequent death on the cross. He wants, by the

instrumentality of painting, to make the association of these ideas

visible. And hence he lets the living Christ throw a shadow which

assumes the form of a cross, thus foretelling the fate of the Saviour,

as if some mysterious, incomprehensible power had so posed his body

with respect to the rays of the sun that a wondrous annunciation of

his destiny must needs write itself on the floor. The invention is

completely absurd. It would have been childish trifling if Christ had

drawn his sublime death of sacrifice, whether in jest or in vanity,

in anticipation, by his shadow on the ground. Neither would the

shadow-picture have had any object, for no contemporary of Christ’s

would have understood the significance of the shadowed cross before

he had suffered death by crucifixion. In Holman Hunt’s consciousness,

however, emotion simultaneously awakened the form of the praying

Christ and of the cross, and he unites both presentations anyhow,

without regard to their reasonable connection. If an Old Master had

had to paint the same idea, namely, the praying Christ filled with

the presentiment of his impending death, he would have shown us in

the picture a realistic Christ in prayer, and in a corner an equally

realistic crucifixion; but he would never have sought to blend both

these different scenes into a single one by a shadowy connection. This

is the difference between the religious painting of the strong healthy

believer and of the emotional degenerate mind.

In the course of time the pre-Raphaelites laid aside many of their

early extravagances. Millais and Holman Hunt no longer practise the

affectation of wilfully bad drawing and of childish babbling in

imitation of Giotto’s language. They have only retained, of the leading

principles of the school, the careful reproduction of the unessential

and the painting of the idea. A benevolent critic, Edward Rod,[93]

says of them: ‘They were themselves writers, and their painting is

literature.’ This speech is still applicable to the school.

A few of the earliest pre-Raphaelites have understood it. They have

recognised in time that they had mistaken their vocation, and have gone

over, from a style of painting which was merely thought-writing, to

genuine writing. The most notable among them is Dante Gabriel Rossetti,

who, though born in England, was the son of an Italian Carbonaro, and

a scholar of Dante. His father gave him the name of the great poet

at his entrance into the world, and this expressive baptismal name

became a constant suggestion, which Rossetti felt, and has, perhaps

half unconsciously, admitted.[94] He is the most instructive example

of the often-quoted assertion of Balzac, of the determining influence

of a name on the development and destiny of its bearer. Rossetti’s

whole poetical feeling was rooted in Dante. His theory of life bears an

indistinct cast of that of the Florentine. Through all his ideas there

runs a reminiscence, faint or strong, of the _Divina Commedia_ or the

_Vita Nuova_.

The analysis of one of his most celebrated poems, _The Blessed

Damozel_, will show this parasitic battening on the body of Dante, and

at the same time disclose some of the most characteristic peculiarities

of the mental working of a mystic’s brain. The first strophe runs thus:

‘The blessed damozel leaned out

From the gold bar of Heaven;

Her eyes were deeper than the depth

Of waters stilled at even;

She had three lilies in her hand,

And the stars in her hair were seven.’

The whole of this description of a lost love, who looks down upon him

from a heaven imagined as a palace, with paradisiacal decorations, is

a reflection of Dante’s _Paradiso_ (Canto iii.), where the Blessed

Virgin speaks to the poet from the moon. We even find details repeated,

_e.g._, the deep and still waters ( ... ‘_ver per acque nitide e

tranquille Non sì profonde, che i fondi sien persi ..._’). The ‘lilies

in her hand’ he gets from the Old Masters, yet even here there is

a slight ring of the morning greeting from the _Purgatorio_ (Canto

xxx.), ‘_Manibus o date lilia plenis._’ He designates his love by the

Anglo-Norman word ‘damozel.’ By this means he makes any clear outlines

in the idea of a girl or lady artificially blurred, and shrouds the

distinct picture in a veil of clouds. By the word ‘girl’ we should

just think of a girl and nothing else. ‘Damozel’ awakens in the

consciousness of the English reader obscure ideas of slim, noble ladies

in the tapestries of old castles, of haughty Norman knights in mail, of

something remote, ancient, half forgotten; ‘damozel’ carries back the

contemporary beloved into the mysterious depths of the Middle Ages, and

spiritualizes her into the enchanted figure of a ballad. This one word

awakens all the crepuscular moods which the body of romantic poets and

authors have bequeathed as a residuum in the soul of the contemporary

reader. In the hand of the ‘damozel’ Rossetti places three lilies,

round her head he weaves seven stars. These numbers are, of course, not

accidental. From the oldest times they have been reckoned as mysterious

and holy. The ‘three’ and the ‘seven’ are allusions to something

unknown, and of deep meaning, which the intuitive reader may try to

understand.

It must not be said that my criticism of the means by which Rossetti

seeks to express his own dreamy states of mind, and to arouse similar

states in the reader, applies equally to all lyrics and poetry

generally, and that I condemn the latter when I adduce the former as

the emanations of the mystic’s weakness of mind. All poetry no doubt

has this peculiarity, that it makes use of words intended not only

to arouse the definite ideas which they connote, but also to awaken

emotions that shall vibrate in consciousness. But the procedure of a

healthy-minded poet is altogether different from that of a weak-minded

mystic. The suggestive word employed by the former has in itself an

intelligible meaning, but besides this it is adapted to excite emotions

in every healthy-minded man; and finally the emotions excited have all

of them reference to the subject of the poem. One example will make

this clear. Uhland sings the _Praise of Spring_ in these words:

‘Saatengrün, Veilchenduft,

Lerchenwirbel, Amselschlag,

Sonnenregen, linde Luft:

Wenn ich solche Worte singe,

Braucht es dann noch grosse Dinge,

Dich zu preisen, Frühlingstag?’[95]

Each word of the first three lines contains a positive idea. Each

of them awakens glad feelings in a man of natural sentiment. These

feelings, taken together, produce the mood with which the awakening of

spring fills the soul, to induce which was precisely the intention of

the poet. When, on the other hand, Rossetti interweaves the mystical

numbers ‘three’ and ‘seven’ in the description of his ‘damozel,’ these

numbers signify nothing in themselves; moreover, they will call up

no emotion at all in an intellectually healthy reader, who does not

believe in mystical numbers; but even in the case of the degenerate and

hysterical reader, on whom the cabbala makes impression, the emotions

excited by the sacred numbers will not involve a reference to the

subject of the poem, viz., the apparition of one loved and lost, but at

best will call up a general emotional consciousness, which may perhaps

tell in a remote way to the advantage of the ‘damozel.’

But to continue the analysis of the poem. To the maiden in bliss it

appears that she has been a singer in God’s choir for only one day;

to him who is left behind this one day has been actually a matter of

ten years. ‘To one it is ten years of years.’ This computation is

thoroughly mystical. It means, that is, absolutely nothing. Perhaps

Rossetti imagined that there may exist a higher unity to which the

single year may stand as one day does to a year; that therefore 365

years would constitute a sort of higher order of year. The words ‘year

of years’ therefore signified 365 years. But as Rossetti portrays

this thought vaguely and imperfectly, he is far from expressing it as

intelligibly as this.

‘It was the rampart of God’s house

That she was standing on;

By God built over the sheer depth

The which is space begun;

So high that, looking downward, thence

She scarce could see the sun.

‘It lies in heaven, across the flood

Of ether, as a bridge.

Beneath, the tides of day and night

With flame and darkness ridge

The void, as low as where this earth

Spins like a fretful midge.

‘Heard hardly, some of her new friends,

Amid their loving games,

Spake evermore among themselves

Their virginal chaste names,

And the souls mounting up to God

Went by her like thin flames.

‘From the fixed place of Heaven she saw

Time like a pulse shake fierce

Through all the worlds....’

I leave it to the reader to imagine all the details of this description

and unite them into one complete picture. If he fail in this in spite

of honest exertion, let him comfort himself by saying that the fault is

not his, but Rossetti’s.

The damozel begins to speak. She wishes that her beloved were already

with her. For come he will.

‘“When round his head the aureole clings,

And he is clothed in white,

I’ll take his hand and go with him

To the deep wells of light.

We will step down as to a stream.

And bathe there in God’s sight.”’

It is to be observed how, in the midst of the turgid stream of these

transcendental senseless modes of speech, the idea of bathing together

takes a definite shape. Mystical reverie never fails to be accompanied

by sensuality.

‘“We two,” she said, “will seek the groves

Where the Lady Mary is,

With her five handmaidens, whose names

Are five sweet symphonies--

Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,

Margaret, and Rosalys.”’

The enumeration of these five feminine names, occupying two lines of

the stanza, is a method of versification characteristic of the mystic.

Here the word ceases to be the symbol of a distinct presentation or

concept, and sinks into a meaningless vocal sound, intended only to

awaken divers agreeable emotions through association of ideas. In this

case the five names arouse gliding shadowy ideas of beautiful young

maidens, ‘Rosalys’ those of roses and lilies as well; and the two

verses together diffuse a glamour of faerie, as if one were roaming at

ease in a garden of flowers, where between lilies and roses slender

white and rosy maidens pace to and fro.

The maiden in paradise goes on picturing to herself the union with her

beloved, and then:

‘she cast her arms along

The golden barriers,

And laid her face between her hands

And wept--I heard her tears.’

These tears are incomprehensible. The blessed maiden after her death

lives in the highest bliss, in a golden palace, in the presence of God

and the Blessed Virgin. What pains her now? That her beloved is not yet

with her? Ten years of mortal men are to her as a single day. Even if

it be her beloved’s destiny to live to be a very old man, she will at

most have to wait only five or six of her days until he appears at her

side, and after this tiny span of time there blossoms for them both an

eternity of joy. It is not, therefore, obvious why she is distressed

and sheds tears. This can only be attributed to the bewildered thoughts

of the mystic poet. He imagines to himself a life of happiness after

death, but at the same time there dawn in his consciousness dim

pictures of the annihilation of individuality, and of final separation

through death, and those painful feelings are excited which we are

accustomed to associate with ideas of death, decay, and separation

from all we love. Hence it is that he comes to close an ecstatic hymn

of immortality with tears, which have a meaning only if one does not

believe in the continuation of life after death. In other respects

also there are contradictions in the poem which show that Rossetti had

not formed any one of his ideas so clearly as to exclude the opposite

and incompatible. Thus, at one time the dead are dressed in white, and

adorned with a galaxy of stars; they appear in pairs and call each

other by caressing names; they must also be thought of as resembling

human beings in appearance, while on another occasion their souls are

‘thin flames’ which rustle past the damozel. Every single idea in the

poem, when we try soberly to follow it out, infallibly takes refuge

after this manner in darkness and intangibility.

In the ‘Divine Comedy,’ echoes of which are ever humming in Rossetti’s

soul, we find nothing of this kind. This was because Dante, like the

Old Masters, was a mystic from ignorance, not from the weak-mindedness

of degeneration. The raw material of his thought, the store of facts

with which he worked, was false, but the use his mind made of it was

true and consistent. All his ideas were clear, homogeneous, and free

from internal contradictions. His hell, his purgatory, his paradise,

he built up on the science of his times, which based its knowledge of

the world exclusively on dogmatic theology. Dante was familiar with the

system of his contemporary, Thomas Aquinas (he was nine years old when

the Doctor Angelicus died), and permeated by it. To the first readers

of the _Inferno_ the poem must have appeared at least as well founded

on fact and as convincing as, let us say, Häckel’s _Natural History of

Creation_ does to the public of to-day. In coming centuries our ideas

of an atom as merely a centre of force, of the disposition of atoms in

the molecule of an organic combination, of ether and its vibrations,

will perhaps be discerned to be just as much poetical dreams as the

ideas of the Middle Ages concerning the abode of the souls of the dead

appear to us. But that is no reason why anyone should claim the right

to designate Helmholtz or William Thompson as mystics, because they

base their work upon those notions which even to their minds do not

to-day represent anything definite. For the same reason no one ought to

call Dante a mystic like a Rossetti. Rossetti’s _Blessed Damozel_ is

not based upon the scientific knowledge of his time, but upon a mist of

undeveloped germs of ideas in constant mutual strife. Dante followed

the realities of the world with the keenly penetrating eyes of an

observer, and bore with him its image down to his hell. Rossetti is not

in a condition to understand, or even to see the real, because he is

incapable of the necessary attention; and since he feels this weakness

he persuades himself, in conformity with human habit, that he does not

wish to do what in reality he cannot do. ‘What is it to me,’ he once

said,[96] ‘whether the earth revolves around the sun or the sun around

the earth?’ To him it is of no importance, because he is incapable of

understanding it.

It is, of course, impossible to go so deeply into all Rossetti’s poems

as into the _Blessed Damozel_; but it is also unnecessary, since we

should everywhere meet with the same mixture of transcendentalism and

sensuality, the same shadowy ideation, the same senseless combinations

of mutually incompatible ideas. Reference, however, must be made to

some of the peculiarities of the poet, because they characterize the

brain-work of weak degenerate minds.

The first thing that strikes us is his predilection for refrains. The

refrain is an excellent artistic medium for the purpose of unveiling

the state of a soul under the influence of a strong emotion. It is

natural that, to the lover yearning for his beloved, the recurring idea

of her should be ever thrusting itself among all the other thoughts in

which he temporarily indulges. It is equally comprehensible that the

unhappy being who is made miserable by thoughts of suicide should be

unable to free himself from an idea which is in harmony with his mental

condition, say of an _Armensünderblum_, or ‘flower of the doomed soul,’

which he sees when walking at night. (See Heine’s poem, _Am Kreuzweg

wird begraben_, in which the line _die Armensünderblum_ is repeated at

the end of both strophes with peculiarly thrilling effect.)

Rossetti’s refrains, however, are different from this, which is

natural and intelligible. They have nothing to do with the emotion or

action expressed by the poem. They are alien to the circle of ideas

belonging to the poem. In a word, they possess the character of an

obsession, which the patient cannot suppress, although he recognises

that they are in no rational connection with the intellectual content

of his consciousness. In the poem _Troy Town_ it is related how Helen,

long before Paris had carried her off, kneels in the temple of Venus

at Sparta, and, drunken with the luxuriant beauty of her own body,

fervently implores the Goddess of Love to send her a man panting for

love, where or whoever he might be, to whom she might give herself.

The absurdity of this fundamental idea it is sufficient to indicate in

passing. The first strophe runs thus:

‘Heaven-born Helen, Sparta’s Queen

(O Troy town!),

Had two breasts of heavenly sheen,

The sun and the moon of the heart’s desire.

All Love’s lordship lay between.

(O Troy’s down,

Tall Troy’s on fire!)

‘Helen knelt at Venus’ shrine

(O Troy town!)

Saying, “A little gift is mine,

A little gift for a heart’s desire.

Hear me speak and make me a sign!

(O Troy’s down,

Tall Troy’s on fire!)”’[97]

And thus through fourteen strophes there constantly recurs, after the

first line, ‘O Troy town!’ at the end of the third line, ‘heart’s

desire’; and after the fourth line, ‘O Troy’s down, tall Troy’s on

fire!’ It is easy to discern what Rossetti wishes. In him there is

repeated the mental process which we recognised in Holman Hunt’s

picture, _The Shadow of the Cross_. As by association of ideas, in

thinking of Helen at Sparta, he hits upon the idea of the subsequent

fate of Troy, so shall the reader, while he sees the young queen in

Sparta intoxicated by her own beauty, be simultaneously presented with

the picture of the yet distant tragical consequences of her longing

desire. But he does not seek to connect these two trains of thought

in a rational way. He is ever muttering as he goes, monotonously as

in a litany, the mysterious invocations to Troy, while he is relating

the visit to the temple of Venus at Sparta. Sollier[98] remarks this

peculiarity among persons of feeble intellect. ‘Idiots,’ he says,

‘insert words which have absolutely no connection with the object.’ And

further on: ‘Among idiots constant repetition [_le rabâchage_] grows

into a veritable _tic_.’

In another very famous poem, _Eden Bower_,[99] which treats of the

pre-Adamite woman Lilith, her lover the serpent of Eden, and her

revenge on Adam, the litany refrain of ‘Eden Bower’s in flower,’ and

‘And O the Bower and the hour,’ are introduced alternately after the

first line in forty-nine strophes. As a matter of course, between these

absolutely senseless phrases and the strophe which each interrupts,

there is not the remotest connection. They are strung together without

any reference to their meaning, but only because they rhyme. It is a

startling example of echolalia.

We frequently find this peculiarity of the weak and deranged mind,

_i.e._, echolalia, in Rossetti. Here are a few proofs:

‘So wet she comes to wed’ (_Stratton Water_).

Here the sound ‘wed’ has called up the sound ‘wet.’ In the poem _My

Sisters Sleep_, in one place where the moon is spoken of, it is said:

‘The hollow halo it was in

Was like an icy crystal cup.’

It is stark nonsense to qualify a plane surface such as a halo by the

adjective ‘hollow.’ The adjective and noun mutually exclude each other,

but the rhyming assonance has joined ‘hollow’ to ‘halo.’ With this we

may also compare the line:

‘Yet both were ours, but hours will come and go’

(_A New Year’s Burden_),

and

‘Forgot it not, nay, but got it not’ (_Beauty_).

Many of Rossetti’s poems consist of the stringing together of wholly

disconnected words, and to mystic readers these absurdities seem

naturally to have the deepest meaning. I should like to cite but one

example. The second strophe of the _Song of the Bower_ says:

‘... My heart, when it flies to thy bower,

What does it find there that knows it again?

There it must droop like a shower-beaten flower,

Red at the rent core and dark with the rain.

Ah! yet what shelter is still shed above it--

What waters still image its leaves torn apart?

Thy soul is the shade that clings round it to love it,

And tears are its mirror deep down in thy heart.’[100]

The peculiarity of such series of words is, that each single word has

an emotional meaning of its own (such as ‘heart,’ ‘bower,’ ‘flies,’

‘droop,’ ‘flower,’ ‘rent,’ ‘dark,’ ‘lone,’ ‘tears,’ etc.), and that

they follow each other with a cradled rhythm and ear-soothing rhyme.

Hence they easily arouse in the emotional and inattentive reader a

general emotion, as does a succession of musical tones in a minor key.

And the reader fancies that he understands the strophe, while he, as a

matter of fact, only interprets his own emotion according to his own

level of culture, his character, and his recollections of what he has

read.

Besides Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it has been customary to include

Swinburne and Morris among the pre-Raphaelite poets. But the similarity

between these two and the head of the school is remote. Swinburne is,

in Magnan’s phrase, a ‘higher degenerate,’ while Rossetti should be

counted among Sollier’s imbeciles. Swinburne is not so emotional as

Rossetti, but he stands on a much higher mental plane. His thought

is false and frequently delirious, but he has thoughts, and they are

clear and connected. He is mystical, but his mysticism partakes more

of the depraved and the criminal than of the paradisiacal and divine.

He is the first representative of ‘Diabolism’ in English poetry. This

is because he has been influenced, not only by Rossetti, but also and

especially by Baudelaire. Like all ‘degenerates,’ he is extraordinarily

susceptible to suggestion, and, consciously or unconsciously, he has

imitated, one after another, all the strongly-marked poetic geniuses

that have come under his notice. He was an echo of Rossetti and

Baudelaire, as he was of Gautier and Victor Hugo, and in his poems it

is possible to trace the course of his reading step by step.

Completely Rossettian, for example, is _A Christmas Carol_.[101]

‘Three damsels in the queen’s chamber,

The queen’s mouth was most fair;

She spake a word of God’s mother,

As the combs went in her hair.

“Mary that is of might,

Bring us to thy Son’s sight.”’

Here we find a mystical content united to the antiquarianism and

childish phraseology of genuine pre-Raphaelitism. _The Masque of

Queen Bersabe_ is worked out on the same model, being an imitation

of the mediæval miracle-play, with its Latin stage directions and

puppet-theatre style. This, in its turn, has become the model of many

French poems, in which there is only a babbling and stammering and a

crawling on all fours, as if in a nursery.

Where he walks in Baudelaire’s footsteps, Swinburne tries to distort

his face to a diabolical mien, and makes the woman say (in _Anactoria_)

to the other unnaturally loved woman:

‘I would my love could kill thee. I am satiated

With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead.

I would earth had thy body as fruit to eat,

And no mouth but some serpent’s found thee sweet.

I would find grievous ways to have thee slain,

Intense device, and superflux of pain;

... O! that I

Durst crush thee out of life with love, and die--

Die of thy pain and my delight, and be

Mixed with thy blood and molten unto thee.’

Or, when he curses and reviles, as in _Before Dawn_:

‘To say of shame--what is it?

Of virtue--we can miss it,

Of sin--we can but kiss it,

And it’s no longer sin.’

One poem deserves a more detailed analysis, because it contains

unmistakably the germ of the later ‘symbolism,’ and is an instructive

example of this form of mysticism. The poem is _The King’s Daughter_.

It is a sort of ballad, which in fourteen four-lined stanzas relates

a fairy story about the ten daughters of a king, of whom one was

preferred before the remaining nine, was beautifully dressed, pampered

with the most costly food, slept in a soft bed, and received the

attentions of a handsome prince, while her sisters remained neglected;

but instead of finding happiness at the prince’s side, she became

deeply wretched and wished she were dead. In the first and third

lines of every stanza the story is rehearsed. The second line speaks

of a mythical mill-stream, which comes into the ballad one knows not

how, and which always, by some mysterious influence, symbolically

reflects all the changes that take place as the action of the ballad

progresses; while the fourth line contains a litany-like exclamation,

which likewise makes a running reference to the particular stage

reached in the narrative.

‘We were ten maidens in the green corn,

Small red leaves in the mill-water:

Fairer maidens never were born,

Apples of gold for the King’s daughter.

‘We were ten maidens by a well-head,

Small white birds in the mill-water:

Sweeter maidens never were wed,

Rings of red for the King’s daughter.’

In the following stanzas the admirable qualities of each of the ten

princesses are portrayed, and the symbolical intermediate lines run

thus:

‘Seeds of wheat in the mill-water-- ... White bread and brown for

the King’s daughter-- ... Fair green weed in the mill-water-- ...

White wine and red for the King’s daughter-- ... Fair thin reeds in

the mill-water-- ... Honey in the comb for the King’s daughter-- ...

Fallen flowers in the mill-water-- ... Golden gloves for the King’s

daughter-- ... Fallen fruit in the mill-water-- ... Golden sleeves for

the King’s daughter-- ...’

The King’s son then comes, chooses the one princess and disdains the

other nine. The symbolical lines point out the contrast between the

brilliant fate of the chosen one and the gloomy destiny of the despised

sisters:

‘A little wind in the mill-water; A crown of red for the King’s

daughter--A little rain in the mill-water; A bed of yellow straw for

all the rest; A bed of gold for the King’s daughter--Rain that rains

in the mill-water; A comb of yellow shell for all the rest,--A comb

of gold for the King’s daughter--Wind and hail in the mill-water;

A grass girdle for all the rest, A girdle of arms for the King’s

daughter--Snow that snows in the mill-water; Nine little kisses for

all the rest, An hundredfold for the King’s daughter.’

The King’s daughter thus appears to be very fortunate, and to be envied

by her nine sisters. But this happiness is only on the surface, for the

poem now suddenly changes:

‘Broken boats in the mill-water;

Golden gifts for all the rest,

Sorrow of heart for the King’s daughter.

‘“Ye’ll make a grave for my fair body,”

Running rain in the mill-water;

“And ye’ll streek my brother at the side of me,”

The pains of hell for the King’s daughter.’

What has brought about this change in her fate the poet purposely

leaves obscure. Perhaps he wishes to have us understand that the King’s

son has no right to sue for her hand, being her brother, and that the

chosen princess for shame at the incest perishes. This would be in

keeping with Swinburne’s childish devilry. But I am not dwelling on

this aspect of the poem, but on its symbolism.

It is psychologically justifiable that a subjective connection should

be set up between our states of mind for the time being and phenomena;

that we should perceive in the external world a reflection of our

moods. If the external world shows a well-marked emotional character,

it awakens in us the mood corresponding to it; and conversely, if

we are under the influence of some pronounced feeling, we notice,

in accordance with the mechanism of attention, only those features

of nature which are in harmony with our mood, which intensify and

sustain it, while the opposing phenomena we neither observe nor even

perceive. A gloomy ravine overhung by a cloudy sky makes us sad. This

is one form of associating our humour with the outer world. But if we

from any cause are already sad, we find some corresponding sadness in

all the scenes around us--in the streets of the metropolis ragged,

starved-looking children, thin, miserably kept cab-horses, a blind

beggar-woman; in the woods withered, mouldering leaves, poisonous

fungi, slimy slugs, etc. If we are joyous, we see just the same

objects, but take no notice of them, perceiving only beside them, in

the street, a wedding procession, a fresh young maiden with a basket of

cherries on her arm, gaily-coloured placards, a funny fat man with his

hat on the back of his head; in the woods, birds flitting by, dancing

butterflies, little white anemones, etc. Here we have the other form

of that association. The poet has a perfect right to make use of both

these forms. If Heine sings:

‘Es ragt ins Meer der Runenstein,

Da sitz ich mit meinen Träumen;

Es pfeift der Wind, die Möwen schrein,

Die Wellen, die wandern und schäumen.

‘Ich habe geliebt manch schönes Kind

Und manchen guten Gesellen--

Wo sind sie hin?--Es pfeift der Wind,

Es schäumen und wandern die Wellen,’[102]

he brings his own mournful, melancholy frame of mind with him. He

bemoans the fleetingness of man’s life, the impermanence of the

feelings, the shadowy passing by and away of beloved companions. In

this state he looks out over the sea from the shore where he sits,

and perceives only those objects that are in keeping with his humour

and give it embodiment: the driving gust of wind, the hurrying gulls,

now seen, now lost to sight, the rolling in and trackless ebbing of

the surf. These features of an ocean scene become symbols of what

is passing through the poet’s mind, and this symbolism is sound and

founded on the laws of thought.

Swinburne’s symbolism is of quite another kind. He does not let

the external world express a mood, but makes it tell a story; he

changes its appearance according to the character of the event he

is describing. Like an orchestra, it accompanies all events which

somewhere are taking place. Here nature is no longer a white wall

on which, as in a game of shadows, the varied visions of the soul

are thrown; but a living, thinking being, which follows the sinful

love-romance with the same tense sympathy as the poet, and which,

with its own media, expresses just as much as he does--complacency,

delight, or sorrow--at every chapter of the story. This is a purely

delirious idea. It corresponds in art and poetry to hallucination in

mental disease. It is a form of mysticism, which is met with in all

the degenerate. Just as in Swinburne the mill-water drives ‘small red

leaves,’ and, what is certainly more curious, ‘little white birds,’

when everything is going on well, and on the other hand is lashed

by snow and hail, and tosses shattered boats about, if things take

an adverse turn; so, in Zola’s _Assommoir_, the drain from a dyeing

factory carries off fluid of a rosy or golden hue on days of happiness,

but a black or gray-coloured stream if the fates of Gervaise and

Lantier grow dark with tragedy. Ibsen, too, in his _Ghosts_, makes it

rain in torrents if Frau Alving and her son are in sore trouble, while

the sunshine breaks forth just as the catastrophe is about to occur.

Ibsen, moreover, goes farther in this hallucinatory symbolism than the

others, since with him Nature not only plays an active part, but shows

scornful malice--she not only furnishes an expressive accompaniment to

the events, but makes merry over them.

William Morris is intellectually far more healthy than Rossetti and

Swinburne. His deviations from mental equilibrium betray themselves,

not through mysticism, but through a want of individuality, and

an overweening tendency to imitation. His affectation consists in

mediævalism. He calls himself a pupil of Chaucer.[103] He artlessly

copies whole stanzas also from Dante, _e.g._, the well-known Francesca

and Paolo episode from Canto V. of the _Inferno_, when he writes in his

_Guenevere_:

‘In that garden fair

Came Lancelot walking; this is true, the kiss

Wherewith we kissed in meeting that spring day,

I scarce dare talk of the remembered bliss.’

Morris persuades himself that he is a wandering minstrel of the

thirteenth or fourteenth century, and takes much trouble to look at

things in such a way, and express them in such language, as would

have befitted a real contemporary of Chaucer. Beyond this poetical

ventriloquism, so to speak, with which he seeks so to alter the sound

of his voice that it may appear to come from far away to our ear, there

are not many features of degeneracy in him to notice. But he sometimes

falls into outspoken echolalia, _e.g._, in a stanza of the _Earthly

Paradise_:

‘Of Margaret sitting glorious there,

In glory of gold and glory of hair,

And glory of glorious face most fair’--

where ‘glory’ and ‘glorious’ are repeated five times in three lines.

His emotional activity in recent years has made him an adherent

of a vague socialism, consisting chiefly of love and pity for his

fellow-men, and which has an odd effect when expressed artistically in

the language of the old ballads.

The pre-Raphaelites have for twenty years exercised a great influence

on the rising generation of English poets. All the hysterical and

degenerate have sung with Rossetti of ‘damozels’ and of the Virgin

Mary, have with Swinburne eulogized unnatural license, crime, hell,

and the devil. They have, with Morris, mangled language in bardic

strains, and in the manner of the _Canterbury Tales_; and if the whole

of English poetry is not to-day unmitigatedly pre-Raphaelite, it is

due merely to the fortunate accident that, contemporaneously with the

pre-Raphaelites, so sound a poet as Tennyson has lived and worked.

The official honours bestowed on him as Poet Laureate, his unexampled

success among readers, pointed him out to a part at least of the petty

strugglers and aspirants as worthy of imitation, and so it comes about

that among the chorus of the lily-bearing mystics there are also heard

other street-singers who follow the poet of the _Idylls of the King_.

In its further development pre-Raphaelitism in England degenerated

into ‘æstheticism,’ and in France into ‘symbolism.’ With both of these

tendencies we must deal more fully.