The Pre-Raphaelites.
In the latter half of the century the Italian Middle Age and Dante, its
great exemplar, found new interpreters in the Rossetti family; a family
well fitted by its mixture of bloods and its hereditary aptitudes,
literary and artistic, to mediate between the English genius and whatever
seemed to it alien or repellant in Dante's system of thought. The
father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a political refugee, who held the
professorship of Italian in King's College, London, from 1831 to 1845,
and was the author of a commentary on Dante which carried the
politico-allegorical theory of the "Divine Comedy" to somewhat fantastic
lengths. The mother was half English and half Italian, a sister of
Byron's travelling companion, Dr. Polidori. Of the four children of the
marriage, Dante Gabriel and Christina became poets of distinction. The
eldest sister, Maria Francesca, a religious devotee who spent her last
years as a member of a Protestant sisterhood, was the author of that
unpretentious but helpful piece of Dante literature, "A Shadow of Dante."
The younger brother, William Michael, is well known as a biographer,
_littérateur_, and art critic, as an editor of Shelley and of the works
of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Other arts besides the literary art had partaken in the romantic
movement. The eighteenth century had seen the introduction of the new,
or English, school of landscape gardening; and the premature beginnings
of the Gothic revival in architecture, which reached a successful issue
some century later.[1] Painting in France had been romanticised in the
thirties _pari passu_ with poetry and drama; and in Germany, Overbeck and
Cornelius had founded a school of sacred art which corresponds, in its
mediaeval spirit, to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In England painting
was the last of the arts to catch the new inspiration. When the change
came, it evinced that same blending of naturalism and Gothicism which
defined the incipient romantic movement of the previous century.
Painting, like landscape gardening, returned to nature; like
architecture, it went back to the past. Like these, and like literature
itself, it broke away from a tradition which was academic, if not
precisely classic in the way in which David was classic.
In 1848 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established by three young
painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William
Holman Hunt. The name expresses their admiration of the early
Italian--and notably the early Florentine--religious painters, like
Giotto, Ghiberti, Bellini, and Fra Angelica. In the work of these men
they found a sweetness, depth, and sincerity of devotional feeling, a
self-forgetfulness and humble adherence to truth, which were absent from
the sophisticated art of Raphael and his successors. Even the imperfect
command of technique in these "primitives" had a charm. The stiffness
and awkwardness of their figure painting, their defects of drawing,
perspective, and light and shade, their lack of anatomical science were
like the lispings of childhood or the artlessness of an old ballad. The
immediate occasion of the founding of the Brotherhood was a book of
engravings which Hunt and Rossetti saw at Millais' house, from the
frescoes by Gozzoli, Orcagna, and others in the Campo Santo, at Pisa; the
same frescoes, it will be remembered, which so strongly impressed Leigh
Hunt and Keats. Holman Hunt--though apparently not his associates--had
also read with eager approval the first volume of Ruskin's "Modern
Painters," in which the young artists of England are advised to "go to
nature in all singleness of heart . . . rejecting nothing, selecting
nothing." Pre-Raphaelitism was a practical, as "Modern Painters" was a
theoretical, protest against the academic traditions which kept young
artists making school copies of Raphael, instructed them that a third of
the canvas should be occupied with a principal shadow, and that no two
people's heads in the picture should be turned the same way, and asked,
"Where are you going to put your brown tree?"
The three original members of the group associated with themselves four
others: Thomas Woolner, the sculptor; James Collinson, a painter; F. G.
Stephens, who began as an artist and ended as an art critic; and
Rossetti's brother William, who was the literary man of the movement.
Woolner was likewise a poet, and contributed to _The Germ_[2] his two
striking pieces, "My Beautiful Lady" and "Of My Lady in Death." Among
other artists not formally enrolled in the Brotherhood, but who worked
more or less in the spirit and principles of Pre-Raphaelitism, were Ford
Madox Brown, an older man, in whose studio Rossetti had, at his own
request, been admitted as a student; Walter Deverell, who took
Collinson's place when the latter resigned his membership in order to
study for the Roman Catholic priesthood; and Arthur Hughes.[3]
But the main importance of the Pre-Raphaelite movement to romantic
literature resides in the poetry of Rossetti, and in the inspiration
which this communicated to younger men, like Morris and Swinburne, and
through them to other and still younger followers. The history of
English painting is no part of our subject, but Rossetti's painting and
his poetry so exactly reflect each other, that some definition or brief
description of Pre-Raphaelitism seems here to be called for, ill
qualified as I feel myself to give any authoritative account of the
matter.[4]
And first as to methods: the Pre-Raphaelites rejected the academic system
whereby the canvas was prepared by rubbing in bitumen, and the colours
were laid upon a background of brown, grey, or neutral tints. Instead of
this, they spread their colours directly upon the white, unprepared
canvas, securing transparency by juxtaposition rather than by overlaying.
They painted their pictures bit by bit, as in frescoes or mosaic work,
finishing each portion as they went along, until no part of the canvas
was left blank. The Pre-Raphaelite theory was sternly realistic. They
were not to copy from the antique, but from nature. For landscape
background, they were to take their easels out of doors. In figure
painting they were to work, if possible, from a living model and not from
a lay figure. A model once selected, it was to be painted as it was in
each particular, and without imaginative deviation. "Every
Pre-Raphaelite landscape background," wrote Ruskin, "is painted, to the
last touch, in the open air from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite
figure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait of some living
person. Every minute accessory is painted in the same manner." [5] In
this fashion their earliest works were executed. In Rossetti's "Girlhood
of Mary Virgin," exhibited in 1849, the figure of St. Anne is a portrait
of the artist's mother; the Virgin, of his sister Christina; and Joseph,
of a man-of-all-work employed in the family. In Millais' "Lorenzo and
Isabella"--a subject from Keats--Isabella's brother, her lover, and one
of the guests, are portraits of Deverell, Stephens, and the two
Rossettis. But this severity of realism was not long maintained. It was
a discipline, not a final method. Even in Rossetti's second painting,
"Ecce Ancilla Domini," the faces of the Virgin and the angel Gabriel are
blendings of several models; although, in its freedom from convention,
its austere simplicity, and endeavour to see the fact as it happened, the
piece is in the purest Pre-Raphaelite spirit. Ruskin insisted that,
while composition was necessarily an affair of the imagination, the
figures and accessories of a picture should be copies from the life. In
the early days of the Brotherhood there was an ostentatious
conscientiousness in observing this rule. We hear a great deal in
Rossetti's correspondence about the brick wall at Chiswick which he
copied into his picture "Found," and about his anxious search for a white
calf for the countryman's cart in the same composition. But all the
Pre-Raphaelites painted from the lay figure as well as from the living
model, and Rossetti, in particular, relied quite as much on memory and
imagination as upon the object before him. W. B. Scott thinks that his
most charming works were the small water-colours on Arthurian subjects;
"done entirely without nature and a good deal in the spirit of
illuminated manuscripts, with very indifferent drawing and perspective
nowhere." As for Millais, he soon departed from rigidly Pre-Raphaelite
principles, and became the most successful and popular of British artists
in genre. In natural talent and cleverness of execution he was the most
brilliant of the three; in imaginative intensity and originality he was
Rossetti's inferior--as in patience and religious earnestness he was
inferior to Hunt. It was Hunt who stuck most faithfully to the programme
of Pre-Raphaelitism. He spent laborious years in the East in order to
secure the exactest local truth of scenery and costume for his Biblical
pieces: "Christ in the Shadow of Death," "Christ in the Temple," and "The
Scapegoat." While executing the last-named, he pitched his tent on the
shores of the Dead Sea and painted the desert landscape and the actual
goat from a model tied down on the edge of the sea. Hunt's "Light of the
World" was one of the masterpieces of the school, and as it is typical in
many ways, may repay description. Ruskin pronounced it "the most perfect
instance of expressional purpose with technical power which the world has
yet produced."
In this tall, narrow canvas the figure of Christ occupies nearly half the
space. He holds a lantern in his hand and knocks at a cottage door. The
face--said to be a portrait of Venables, curate of St. Paul's, Oxford--is
quite unlike the type which Raphael has made traditional. It is
masculine--even rugged--seamed with lines of care, and filled with an
expression of yearning. There is anxiety and almost timidity in his pose
as he listens for an answer to his knock. The nails and bolts of the
door are rusted; it is overgrown with ivy and the tall stalks and flat
umbels of fennel. The sill is choked with nettles and other weeds,
emblems all of the long sleep of the world which Christ comes to break.
The full moon makes a halo behind his head and shines through the low
boughs of an orchard, whose apples strew the dark grass in the
foreground, sown with spots of light from the star-shaped perforations in
the lantern-cover. They are the apples of Eden, emblems of the Fall.
Everything, in fact, is symbolical. Christ's seamless white robe, with
its single heavy fold, typifies the Church catholic; the jewelled clasps
of the priestly mantle, one square and one oval, are the Old and New
Testaments. The golden crown is enwoven with one of thorns, from which
new leaves are sprouting. The richly embroidered mantle hem has its
meaning, and so have the figures on the lantern. To get the light in
this picture right, Hunt painted out of doors in an orchard every
moonlight night for three months from nine o'clock till five. While
working in his studio, he darkened one end of the room, put a lantern in
the hand of his lay-figure and painted this interior through the hole in
a curtain. On moonlight nights he let the moon shine in through the
window to mix with the lantern light. It was a principle with the
Brotherhood that detail, though not introduced for its own sake, should
be painted with truth to nature. Hunt, especially, took infinite pains
to secure minute exactness in his detail. Ruskin wrote in enthusiastic
praise of the colours of the gems on the mantle clasp in "The Light of
the World," and said that all the Academy critics and painters together
could not have executed one of the nettle leaves at the bottom of the
picture. The lizards in the foreground of Millais' "Ferdinand Lured by
Ariel" (exhibited in 1850) were studied from life, and Scott makes merry
over the shavings on the floor of the carpenter shop in the same artist's
"Christ in the House of his Parents," a composition which was ferociously
ridiculed by Dickens in "Household Words."
The symbolism which is so pronounced a feature in "The Light of the
World" is common to all the Pre-Raphaelite art. It is a mediaeval note,
and Rossetti learned it from Dante. Symbolism runs through the "Divine
Comedy" in such touches as the rush, emblem of humility, with which
Vergil girds Dante for his journey through Purgatory; the constellation
of four stars--
"Non viste mai fuor ch' alla prima gente"--
typifying the cardinal virtues; the three different coloured steps to the
door of Purgatory;[6] and thickening into the elaborate apocalyptic
allegory of the griffin and the car of the church, the eagle and the
mystic tree in the last cantos of the "Purgatorio." In Hunt's "Christ in
the Shadow of Death," the young carpenter's son is stretching his arms
after work, and his shadow, thrown upon the wall, is a prophecy of the
crucifixion. In Millais' "Christ in the House of his Parents," the boy
has wounded the palm of his hand upon a nail, another foretokening of the
crucifixion. In Rossetti's "Girlhood of Mary Virgin," Joseph is training
a vine along a piece of trellis in the shape of the cross; Mary is
copying in embroidery a three-flowered white lily plant, growing in a
flower-pot which stands upon a pile of books lettered with the names of
the cardinal virtues. The quaint little child angel who tends the plant
is a portrait of a young sister of Thomas Woolner. Similarly, in "Ecce
Ancilla Domini," the lily of the annunciation which Gabriel holds is
repeated in the piece of needlework stretched upon the 'broidery frame at
the foot of Mary's bed. In "Beata Beatrix" the white poppy brought by
the dove is the symbol at once of chastity and of death; and the shadow
upon the sun-dial marks the hour of Beatrice's beatification. Again, in
"Dante's Dream," poppies strew the floor, emblems of sleep and death; an
expiring lamp symbolises the extinction of life; and a white cloud borne
away by angels is Beatrice's departing soul. Love stands by the couch in
flame-coloured robes, fastened at the shoulder with the scallop shell
which is the badge of pilgrimage. In Millais' "Lorenzo and Isabella" the
salt-box is overturned upon the table, signifying that peace is broken
between Isabella's brothers and their table companion. Doves are
everywhere in Rossetti's pictures, embodiments of the Holy Ghost and the
ministries of the spirit, Rossetti labelled his early manuscript poems
"Poems of the Art Catholic"; and the Pre-Raphaelite heresy was connected
by unfriendly critics with the Anglo-Catholic or Tractarian movement at
Oxford. William Sharp, in speaking of "that splendid outburst of
Romanticism in which Coleridge was the first and most potent
participant," and of the lapse or ebb that followed the death of
Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, resumes: "At last a time came when
a thrill of expectation, of new desire, of hope, passed through the
higher lives of the nation; and what followed thereafter were the Oxford
movement in the Church of England, the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art,
and the far-reaching Gothic revival. Different as these movements were
in their primary aims, and still more differing in the individual
representations of interpreters, they were in reality closely interwoven,
one being the outcome of the other. The study of mediaeval art, which
was fraught with such important results, was the outcome of the
widespread ecclesiastical revival, which in its turn was the outcome of
the Tractarian movement in Oxford. The influence of Pugin was potent in
strengthening the new impulse, and to him succeeded Ruskin with 'Modern
Painters' and Newman with the 'Tracts for the Times.' Primarily the
Pre-Raphaelite movement had its impulse in the Oxford religious revival;
and however strange it may seem to say that such men as Holman Hunt and
Rossetti . . . followed directly in the footsteps of Newman and Pusey and
Keble, it is indubitably so." [7] Ruskin, too, cautioned his young
friends that "if their sympathies with the early artists lead them into
mediaevalism or Romanism, they will of course come to nothing. But I
believe there is no danger of this, at least for the strongest among
them. There may be some weak ones whom the Tractarian heresies may
touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches from a strong
stem." [8] One of these weak ones who dropped off was James Collinson, a
man of an ascetic and mystical piety--like Werner or Brentano. He
painted, among other things, "The Renunciation of St. Elizabeth" from
Kingsley's "Saint's Tragedy." "The picture," writes Scott, "resembled
the feckless dilettanteism of the converts who were then dropping out of
their places in Oxford and Cambridge into Mariolatry and Jesuitism. In
fact, this James Collinson actually did become Romanist, wanted to be a
priest, painted no more, but entered a seminary, where they set him to
clean the boots as an apprenticeship in humility and obedience. They did
not want him as a priest; they were already getting tired of that species
of convert; so he left, turned to painting again, and disappeared." [9]
M. de la Sizeranne is rather scornful of these metaphysical definitions
of Pre-Raphaelitism; "for to characterise a Pre-Raphaelite picture by
saying that it was inspired by the Oxford movement, is like attempting to
explain the mechanism of a lock by describing the political opinions of
the locksmith." [10] He himself proposes, as the distinguishing
characteristics of Pre-Raphaelite art, originality of gesture and
vividness of colouring. This is the professional point of view; but the
student of literature is less concerned with such technical aspects of
the subject than with those spiritual aspects which connect the work of
the Pre-Raphaelites with the great mediaeval or romantic revival.
When Ruskin came to the rescue of the P.-R. B. in 1851, in those letters
to the _Times_, afterwards reprinted in pamphlet form under the title
"Pre-Raphaelitism," he recognised the propriety of the name, and the real
affinity between the new school and the early Italian schools of sacred
art. Mediaeval art, he asserted,[11] was religious and truthful, modern
art is profane and insincere. "In mediaeval art, thought is the first
thing, execution is the second; in modern art, execution is the first
thing and thought is the second. And again, in mediaeval art, truth is
first, beauty second; in modern art, beauty is first, truth second."
Ruskin denied that the Pre-Raphaelites were unimaginative, though he
allowed that they had a disgust for popular forms of grace and
prettiness. And he pointed out a danger in the fact that their
principles confined them to foreground work, and called for laborious
finish on a small scale. In "Modern Painters" he complained that the
Pre-Raphaelites should waste a whole summer in painting a bit of oak
hedge or a bed of weeds by a duck pond, which caught their fancy perhaps
by reminding them of a stanza in Tennyson. Nettles and mushrooms, he
said, were good to make nettle soup and fish sauce; but it was too bad
that the nobler aspects of nature, such as the banks of the castled
Rhine, should be left to the frontispieces in the Annuals. Ruskin,
furthermore, denied that the drawing of the Pre-Raphaelites was bad or
their perspective false; or that they imitated the _errors_ of the early
Florentine painters, whom they greatly excelled in technical
accomplishment. Meanwhile be it remarked that the originality of gesture
in Pre-Raphaelite figure painting, which M. de la Sizeranne notices, was
only one more manifestation of the romantic desire for individuality and
concreteness as against the generalising academicism of the eighteenth
century.[12]
As poets, the Pre-Raphaelites derive from Keats rather than from Scott,
in their exclusive devotion to beauty, to art for art's sake; in their
single absorption in the passion of love; and in their attraction towards
the more esoteric side of mediaeval life, rather than towards its broad,
public, and military aspects.[13]
Rossetti's position in the romantic literature of the last half of the
ninetenth century is something like Coleridge's in the first half.
Unlike Coleridge, he was the leader of a school, the master of a definite
group of artists and poets. His actual performance, too, far exceeds
Coleridge's in amount, if not in value. But like Coleridge, he was a
seminal mind, a mind rich in original suggestions, which inspired and
influenced younger men to carry out its ideas, often with a fluency of
utterance and a technical dexterity both in art and letters which the
master himself did not possess. Holman Hunt, Millais, and Burne-Jones
among painters, Morris and Swinburne among poets, were disciples of
Rossetti who in some ways outdid him in execution. His pictures were
rarely exhibited, and no collection of his poems was published till 1870.
Meanwhile, however, many of these had circulated in manuscript, and
"secured a celebrity akin in kind and almost equal in extent to that
enjoyed by Coleridge's 'Christabel' during the many years preceding 1816
in which it lay in manuscript. Like Coleridge's poem in another
important particular, certain of Rossetti's ballads, while still unknown
to the public, so far influenced contemporary poetry that when they did
at length appear, they had all the seeming to the uninitiated of work
imitated from contemporary models, instead of being, as in fact they
were, the primary source of inspiration for writers whose names were
earlier established." [14] William Morris, _e.g._, had printed four
volumes of verse in advance of Rossetti, and the earliest of these, "The
Defence of Guenevere," which contains his most intensely Pre-Raphaelite
work and that most evidently done in the spirit of Rossetti's teachings,
saw the light (1858) twelve years before Rossetti's own. Swinburne, too,
had published three volumes of poetry before 1870, including the "Poems
and Ballads" of 1866, in which Rossetti's influence is plainly manifest;
and he had already secured a wide fame at a time when the elder poet's
reputation was still esoteric and mainly confined to the _cénacle_.
William M. Rossetti, in describing the literary influences which moulded
his brother's tastes, tells us that "in the long run he perhaps enjoyed
and revered Coleridge beyond any other modern poet whatsoever." [15]
It is worth while to trace these literary influences with some detail,
since they serve to link the neo-romantic poetry of our own time to the
product of that older generation which had passed away before Rossetti
came of age. It is interesting to find then, that at the age of fifteen
(1843) he taught himself enough German to enable him to translate
Bürger's "Lenore," as Walter Scott had done a half-century before. This
devil of a poem so haunts our history that it has become as familiar a
spirit as Mrs. Radcliffe's bugaboo apparitions, and our flesh refuses any
longer to creep at it. It is quite one of the family. It would seem,
indeed, as if Bürger's ballad was set as a school copy for every young
romanticist in turn to try his 'prentice hand upon. Fortunately,
Rossetti's translation has perished, as has also his version--some
hundred lines--of the earlier portion of the "Nibelungenlied." But a
translation which he made about the same time of the old Swabian poet,
Hartmann von Aue's "Der Arme Heinrich" (Henry the Leper) is preserved,
and was first published in 1886. This poem, it will be remembered, was
the basis of Longfellow's "Golden Legend" (1851). Rossetti did not keep
up his German, and in later years he never had much liking for
Scandinavian or Teutonic literature. He was a Latin, and he made it his
special task to interpret to modern Protestant England whatever struck
him as most spiritually intense and characteristic in the Latin Catholic
Middle Age. The only Italian poet whom he "earnestly loved" was Dante.
He did not greatly care for Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso--the
Renaissance poets--though in boyhood he had taken delight in Ariosto,
just as he had in Scott and Byron. But that was a stage through which he
passed; none of these had any ultimate share in Rossetti's culture. At
fifteen he wrote a ballad entitled "Sir Hugh the Heron," founded on a
tale of Allan Cunningham, but taking its name and motto from the lines in
"Marmion"--
"Sir Hugh the Heron bold,
Baron of Twisell and of Ford,
And Captain of the Hold."
A few copies of this were printed for family circulation by his fond
grandfather, G. Polidori. Among French writers he had no modern
favourites beyond Hugo, Musset, and Dumas. But like all the
neo-romanticists, he was strongly attracted by François Villon, that
strange Parisian poet, thief, and murderer of the fifteenth century. He
made three translations from Villon, the best known of which is the
famous "Ballad of Dead Ladies" with its felicitous rendering of the
refrain--
"But where are the snows of yester year?"
(Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?)
There are at least three good English verse renderings of this ballad of
Villon; one by Andrew Lang; one by John Payne, and doubtless innumerable
others, unknown to me or forgotten. In fact, every one translates it
nowadays, as every one used to translate Bürger's ballad. It is the
"Lenore" of the neo-romanticists. Rossetti was a most accomplished
translator, and his version of Dante's "Vita Nuova" and of the "Early
Italian Poets" (1861)--reissued as "Dante and His Circle" (1874)--is a
notable example of his skill. There are two other specimens of old
French minstrelsy, and two songs from Victor Hugo's "Burgraves" among his
miscellaneous translations; and William Sharp testifies that Rossetti at
one time thought of doing for the early poetry of France what he had
already done for that of Italy, but never found the leisure for it.[16]
Rossetti had no knowledge of Greek, and "the only classical poet," says
his brother, "whom he took to in any degree worth speaking of was Homer,
the 'Odyssey' considerably more than the 'Iliad.'" This, I presume, he
knew only in translation, but the preference is significant, since, as we
have seen, the "Odyssey" is the most romantic of epics. Among English
poets, he preferred Keats to Shelley, as might have been expected.
Shelley was a visionary and Keats was an artist; Shelley often abstract,
Keats always concrete. Shelley had a philosophy, or thought he had;
Keats had none, neither had Rossetti. It is quite comprehensible that
the sensuous element in Keats would attract a born colourist like
Rossetti beyond anything in the English poetry of that generation; and I
need not repeat that the latest Gothic or romantic schools have all been
taking Keats' direction rather than Scott's, or even than Coleridge's.
Rossetti's work, I should say, _e.g._, in such a piece as "The Bride's
Prelude," is a good deal more like "Isabella" and "The Eve of St. Agnes"
than it is like "The Ancient Mariner" or "Christabel" or "The Lay of the
Last Minstrel." Rossetti got little from Milton and Dryden, or even from
Chaucer and Spenser. Wordsworth he valued hardly at all. In the last
two or three years of his life he came to have an exaggerated admiration
for Chatterton. Rossetti's taste, like his temperament, was tinctured
with morbidness. He sought the intense, the individual, the symbolic,
the mystical. These qualities he found in a supreme degree in Dante.
Probably it was only his austere artistic conscience which saved him from
the fantastic--the merely peculiar or odd--and kept him from going astray
after false gods like Poe and Baudelaire. Chaucer was a mediaeval poet
and Spenser certainly a romantic one, but their work was too broad, too
general in its appeal, too healthy, one might almost say, to come home to
Rossetti.[17] William Rossetti testifies that "any writing about devils,
spectres, or the supernatural generally . . . had always a fascination
for him." Sharp remarks that work more opposite than Rossetti's to the
Greek spirit can hardly be imagined. "The former [the Greek spirit]
looked to light, clearness, form in painting, sculpture, architecture; to
intellectual conciseness and definiteness in poetry; the latter
[Rossetti] looked mainly to diffused colour, gradated to almost
indefinite shades in his art, finding the harmonies thereof more akin
than severity of outline and clearness of form; while in his poetry the
Gothic love of the supernatural, the Gothic delight in sensuous images,
the Gothic instinct of indefiniteness and elaboration, carried to an
extreme, prevailed. . . . He would take more pleasure in a design
by . . . William Blake . . . than in the more strictly artistic drawing
of some revered classicist; more enjoyment in the weird or dramatic
Scottish ballad than in Pindaric or Horatian ode; and he would certainly
rather have had Shakspere than Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides put
together."
Rossetti's office in the later and further development of romantic art
was threefold: First, to revive and express, both in painting and poetry,
the religious spirit of the early Florentine schools; secondly, to give a
more intimate interpretation of Dante to the English public, and
especially of Dante's life and personality and of his minor poetry, like
the "Vita Nuova," which had not yet been translated; thirdly, to afford
new illustrations of mediaeval life and thought, partly by treating
legendary matter in the popular ballad form, and partly by treating
romantic matter of his own invention with the rich colour and sensuous
imagery which belonged to his pictorial art.
"Perhaps," writes Mr. Caine,[18] "Catholicism is itself essentially
mediaeval, and perhaps a man cannot possibly be a 'mediaeval artist,
heart and soul,' without partaking of a strong religious feeling that is
primarily Catholic--so much were the religion and art of the Middle Ages
knit each to each. . . . Rossetti's attitude towards spiritual things
was exactly the reverse of what we call Protestant. . . . He constantly
impressed me during the last days of his life with the conviction that he
was by religious bias of nature a monk of the Middle Ages." All this is
true in a way, yet Rossetti strikes one as being Catholic, without being
religious; as mediaeval rather than Christian. He was agnostic in his
belief and not devout in his practice; so that the wish that he suddenly
expressed in his last illness, to confess himself to a priest, affected
his friends as a singular caprice. It was the romantic quality in the
Italian sacred art of the Middle Ages that attracted him; and it
attracted him as a poet and painter, not as a devotee. There was little
in Rossetti of the mystical and ascetic piety of Novalis or Zacharias
Werner; nor of the steady religious devotion of his friend Holman Hunt,
or his own sister Christina.
Rossetti, by the way, was never in Italy, though he made several visits
to France and Belgium. A glance at the list of his designs--extending to
some four hundred titles--in oil, water-colour, crayon, pen and ink,
etc., will show how impartially his interest was distributed over the
threefold province mentioned above. There are sacred pieces like "Mary
Magdalen at the Door of Simon the Pharisee," "St. Cecily," a "Head of
Christ," a "Triptych for Llandaff Cathedral"; Dante subjects such as
"Paolo and Francesca," "Beata Beatrix," "La Donna della Finestra,"
"Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante"; and, in greater number,
compositions of a purely romantic nature--"Fair Rosamond," "La Belle Dame
sans Merci," "The Chapel before the Lists," "Michael Scott's Wooing,"
"Meeting of Sir Tristram and Yseult," "Lady Lilith," "The Damozel of the
Sanct Grail," "Death of Breuse sans Pitié," and the like.
It will be noticed that some of these subjects are taken from the Round
Table romances. Tennyson was partly responsible for the newly awakened
interest in the Arthurian legend, but the purely romantic manner which he
had abandoned in advancing from "Sir Galahad" and "The Lady of Shalott"
to the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842 and the first "Idylls" of 1859, continued
to characterise the work of the Pre-Raphaelites both in poetry and in
painting. Malory's "Morte Darthur" was one of Rossetti's favourite
books, and he preferred it to Tennyson, as containing "the _weird_
element in its perfection. . . . Tennyson _has_ it certainly here and
there in imagery, but there is no great success in the part it plays
through his 'Idylls.'" [19] The five wood-engravings from designs
furnished by Rossetti for the Moxon Tennyson quarto of 1857 include three
Arthurian subjects: "The Lady of Shalott," "King Arthur Sleeping in
Avalon," and "Sir Galahad Praying in the Wood-Chapel." "Interwoven as
were the Romantic revival and the aesthetic movement," writes Mr. Sharp,
"it could hardly have been otherwise but that the young painter-poet
should be strongly attracted to that Arthurian epoch, the legendary
glamour of which has since made itself so widely felt in the Arthurian
idyls of the laureate. . . . Mr. Ruskin speaks, in his lecture on 'The
Relation of Art to Religion' delivered in Oxford, of our indebtedness to
Rossetti as the painter to whose genius we owe the revival of interest in
the cycle of early English legend."
It was in 1857 that Rossetti, whose acquaintance had been recently sought
by three young Oxford scholars, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and
Algernon Charles Swinburne, volunteered to surround the gallery of the
new Union Club House at Oxford with life-size frescoes from the "Morte
Darthur." [20] He was assisted in this work by a number of enthusiastic
disciples. Burne-Jones had already done some cartoons in colour for
stained glass, and Morris had painted a subject from the "Morte Darthur,"
to wit: "Sir Tristram after his Illness, in the Garden of King Mark's
Palace, recognised by the Dog he had given to Iseult." Rossetti's
contribution to the Oxford decorations was "Sir Lancelot before the
Shrine of the Sangreal." Morris' was "Sir Palomides' Jealousy of Sir
Tristram and Iseult," an incident which he also treated in his poetry.
Burne-Jones, Valentine Prinsep, J. H. Pollen, and Arthur Hughes likewise
contributed. Scott says that these paintings were interesting as
designs; that they were "poems more than pictures, being large
illuminations and treated in a mediaeval manner." But he adds that not
one of the band knew anything about wall painting. They laid their
water-colours, not on a plastered surface, but on a rough brick wall,
merely whitewashed. They used no adhesive medium, and in a few months
the colours peeled off and the whole series became invisible.
A co-partnership in subjects, a duplication of treatment, or
interchange between the arts of poetry and painting characterise
Pre-Raphaelite work. For example, Morris' poems, "The Blue Closet"
and "The Tune of Seven Towers" were inspired by the similarly entitled
designs of Rossetti. They are interpretations in language of pictorial
suggestions--"word-paintings" in a truer meaning than that much-abused
piece of critical slang commonly bears. In one of these compositions--a
water-colour, a study in colour and music symbolism--four damozels in
black and purple, white and green, scarlet and white, and crimson, are
singing or playing on a lute and clavichord in a blue-tiled room; while
in front of them a red lily grows up through the floor. To this interior
Morris' "stunning picture"--as his friend called it--adds an obscurely
hinted love story: the burden of a bell booming a death-knell in the
tower overhead; the sound of wind and sea; and the Christmas snows
outside. Conversely Rossetti's painting, "Arthur's Tomb," was suggested
by Morris' so-named poem in his 1858 volume.
Or, again, compare Morris' poem, "Sir Galahad: A Christmas Mystery," with
the following description of Rossetti's aquarelle, "How Sir Galahad, Sir
Bors, and Sir Percival were fed with the Sanc Grael; but Sir Percival's
sister died by the way": "On the right is painted the altar, and in front
of it the damsel of the Sanc Grael giving the cup to Sir Galahad, who
stoops forward to take it over the dead body of Sir Percival's sister,
who lies calm and rigid in her green robe and red mantle, and near whose
feet grows from the ground an aureoled lily, while, with his left hand,
the saintly knight leads forward his two companions, him who has lost his
sister, and the good Sir Bors. Behind the white-robed damsel at the
altar, a dove, bearing the sacred casket, poises on outspread pinions;
and immediately beyond the fence enclosing the sacred space, stands a row
of nimbused angels, clothed in white and with crossed scarlet or
flame-coloured wings." [21]
Rossetti's powerful ballad, "The King's Tragedy," was suggested by the
mural paintings (encaustic) with which William Bell Scott decorated the
circular staircase of Penkill Castle in 1865-68. These were a series of
scenes from "The Kinges Quair" once attributed to James I. of Scotland.
The photogravure reproduction, from a painting by Arthur Hughes of a
section of the Penkill Castle staircase, represents the king looking from
the window of his prison in Windsor Castle at Lady Jane Beaufort walking
with her handmaidens in a very Pre-Raphaelite garden. At the left of the
picture, Cupid aims an arrow at the royal lover. Rossetti, Hunt, and
Millais were all great lovers of Keats. Hunt says that his "Escape of
Madeline and Prospero" was the first subject from Keats ever painted, and
was highly acclaimed by Rossetti. At the formation of the P.-R B. in
1848, it was agreed that the first work of the Brotherhood should be in
illustration of "Isabella," and a series of eight subjects was selected
from the poem. Millais executed at once his "Lorenzo and Isabella," but
Hunt's "Isabella and the Pot of Basil" was not finished till 1867, and
Rossetti's part of the programme was never carried out. Rossetti's "La
Belle Dame sans Merci," Mr. J. M. Strudwick's "Madness of Isabella,"
Arthur Hughes' triptych of "The Eve of St. Agnes," and Millais' great
painting, "St. Agnes' Eve," were other tributes of Pre-Raphaelite art to
the young master of romantic verse.
Whether this interpenetration of poetry and painting is of advantage to
either, may admit of question. Emerson said to Scott: "We [Americans]
scarcely take to the Rossetti poetry; it does not come home to us; it is
exotic." The sonnets of "The House of Life" have appeared to many
readers obscure and artificial, the working out in language of
conceptions more easily expressible by some other art; expressed here, at
all events, through imagery drawn from a special and even technical range
of associations. Such readers are apt to imagine that Rossetti suffers
from a hesitation between poetry and painting; as Sidney Lanier is
thought by some to have been injured artistically by halting midway
between music and verse. The method proper to one art intrudes into the
other; everything that the artist does has the air of an experiment; he
paints poems and writes pictures.
A department of Rossetti's verse consists of sonnets written for
pictures, pictures by Botticelli, Mantegna, Giorgione, Burne-Jones, and
others, and in many cases by himself, and giving thus a double rendering
of the same invention. But even when not so occasioned, his poems nearly
always suggest pictures. Their figures seem to have stepped down from
some fifteenth-century altar piece bringing their aureoles and golden
backgrounds with them. This is to be pictorial in a very different sense
from that in which Tennyson is said to be a pictorial poet. Hall Caine
informs us that Rossetti "was no great lover of landscape beauty." His
scenery does not, like Wordsworth's or Tennyson's, carry an impression of
life, of the real outdoors. Nature with Rossetti has been passed through
the medium of another art before it comes into his poetry; it is a doubly
distilled nature. It is nature as we have it in the "Roman de la Rose,"
or the backgrounds of old Florentine painters: flowery pleasances and
orchard closes, gardens with trellises and singing conduits, where ladies
are playing at the palm play. In his most popular poem, "The Blessed
Damosel"--a theme which he both painted and sang--the feeling is
exquisitely and voraciously human. The maiden is "homesick in heaven,"
and yearns back towards the earth and her lover left behind. Even so,
with her symbolic stars and lilies, she is so like the stiff, sweet
angels of Fra Angelico or Perugino, that one almost doubts when the poet
says
"--her bosom must have made
The bar she leaned on warm."
The imagery of the poem is right out of the picture world;
"The clear ranged, unnumbered heads
Bowed with their aureoles."
The imaginations are Dantesque:
"And the souls, mounting up to God,
Went by her like thin flames."
"The light thrilled towards her, filled
With angels in strong, level flight."
Even in "Jenny," one of the few poems of Rossetti that deal with modern
life, mediaeval art will creep in.
"Fair shines the gilded aureole
In which our highest painters place
Some living woman's simple face.
And the stilled features thus descried,
As Jenny's long throat droops aside--
The shadows where the cheeks are thin
And pure wide curve from ear to chin--
With Raffael's, Leonardo's hand
To show them to men's souls might stand."
The type of womanly beauty here described is characteristic; it is the
type familiar to all in "Pandora," "Proserpine," "La Ghirlandata," "The
Day Dream," "Our Lady of Pity," and the other life-size, half-length
figure paintings in oil which were the masterpieces of his maturer style.
The languid pose, the tragic eyes with their mystic, brooding intensity
in contrast with the full curves of the lips and throat, give that union
of sensuousness and spirituality which is a constant trait of Rossetti's
poetry. The Pre-Raphaelites were accused of exaggerating the height of
their figures. In Burne-Jones, whose figures are eight and a half heads
high, the exaggeration is deliberate. In Morris' and Swinburne's early
poems all the lines of the female face and figure are long--the hand, the
foot, the throat, the "curve from chin to ear," and above all, the
hair.[22] The hair in these paintings of Rossetti seems a romantic
exaggeration, too; immense, crinkly waves of it spreading off to left and
right. William Morris' beautiful wife is said to have been his model in
the pieces above named.
The first collection of original poems by Rossetti was published in 1870.
The manuscripts had been buried with his wife in 1862. When he finally
consented to their publication, the coffin had to be exhumed and the
manuscripts removed. In 1881 a new edition was issued with changes and
additions; and in the same year the volume of "Ballads and Sonnets" was
published, including the sonnet sequence of "The House of Life." Of the
poems in these two collections which treat directly of Dante the most
important is "Dante at Verona," a noble and sustained piece in
eighty-five stanzas, slightly pragmatic in manner, in which are enwoven
the legendary and historical incidents of Dante's exile related by the
early biographers, together with many personal allusions from the "Divine
Comedy." But Dante is nowhere very far off either in Rossetti's painting
or in his poetry. In particular, the history of Dante's passion for
Beatrice, as told in the "Vita Nuova," in which the figure of the girl is
gradually transfigured and idealised by death into the type of heavenly
love, made an enduring impression upon Rossetti's imagination. Shelley,
in his "Epipsychidion," had appealed to this great love story, so
characteristic at once of the mediaeval mysticism and of the Platonic
spirit of the early Renaissance. But Rossetti was the first to give a
thoroughly sympathetic interpretation of it to English readers. It
became associated most intimately with his own love and loss. We see it
in a picture like "Beata Beatrix," and a poem like "The Portrait,"
written many years before his wife's death, but subsequently retouched.
Who can read the following stanza without thinking of Beatrice and the
"Paradiso"?
"Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears
The beating heart of Love's own breast,--
Where round the secret of all spheres
All angels lay their wings to rest,--
How shall my soul stand rapt and awed,
When, by the new birth borne abroad
Throughout the music of the suns,
It enters in her soul at once
And knows the silence there for God!"
Rossetti's ballads and ballad-romances, all intensely mediaeval in
spirit, fall, as regards their manner, into two very different classes.
Pieces like "The Blessed Damozel," "The Bride's Prelude," "Rose Mary,"
and "The Staff and Scrip" (from a story in the "Gesta Romanorum") are art
poems, rich, condensed, laden with ornament, pictorial. Every attitude
of every figure is a pose; landscapes and interiors are painted with
minute Pre-Raphaelite finish. "The Bride's Prelude"--a fragment--opens
with the bride's confession to her sister, in the 'tiring-room sumptuous
with gold and jewels and brocade, where the air is heavy with musk and
myrrh, and sultry with the noon. In the pauses of her tale stray lute
notes creep in at the casement, with noises from the tennis court and the
splash of a hound swimming in the moat. In "Rose Mary," which employs
the superstition in the old lapidaries as to the prophetic powers of the
beryl-stone, the colouring and imagery are equally opulent, and, in
passages, Oriental.
On the other hand, "Stratton Water," "Sister Helen," "The White Ship,"
and "The King's Tragedy" are imitations of popular poetry, done with a
simulated roughness and simplicity. The first of these adopts a common
ballad motive, a lover's desertion of his sweetheart through the
contrivances of his wicked kinsfolk:
"And many's the good gift, Lord Sands,
You've promised oft to me;
But the gift of yours I keep to-day
Is the babe in my body." . . .
"Look down, look down, my false mother,
That bade me not to grieve:
You'll look up when our marriage fires
Are lit to-morrow eve."
"Sister Helen" is a ballad in dialogue with a subtly varying repetend,
and introduces the popular belief that a witch could kill a man slowly by
melting a wax figure. Twice Rossetti essayed the historical ballad.
"The White Ship" tells of the drowning of the son and daughter of Henry
I. with their whole ship's company, except one survivor, Berold, the
butcher of Rouen, who relates the catastrophe. The subject of "The
King's Tragedy" is the murder of James I. by Robert Graeme and his men in
the Charterhouse of Perth. The teller of the tale is Catherine Douglas,
known in Scottish tradition as Kate Barlass, who had thrust her arm
through the staple, in place of a bar, to hold the door against the
assassins. A few stanzas of "The Kinges Quair" are fitted into the poem
by shortening the lines two syllables each, to accommodate them to the
ballad metre. It is generally agreed that this was a mistake, as was
also the introduction of the "Beryl Songs" between the narrative parts of
"Rose Mary." These ballads of Rossetti compare well with other modern
imitations of popular poetry. "Sister Helen," _e.g._, has much greater
dramatic force than Tennyson's "Oriana" or "The Sisters." Yet they
impress one, upon the whole, as less characteristic than the poet's
Italianate pieces; as _tours de force_ carefully pitched in the key of
minstrel song, but falsetto in effect. Compared with such things as
"Cadyow Castle" or "Jack o' Hazeldean," they are felt to be the work of
an art poet, resolute to divest himself of fine language and scrupulously
observant of ballad convention in phrase and accent--details of which
Scott was often heedless--but devoid of that hearty, natural sympathy
with the conditions of life from which popular poetry sprang, and wanting
the lyrical pulse that beats in the ballad verse of Scott, Kingsley, and
Hogg. In "The King's Tragedy" Rossetti was poaching on Scott's own
preserves, the territory of national history and legend. If we can guess
how Scott would have handled the same story, we shall have an object
lesson in two contrasted kinds of romanticism. Scott could not have
bettered the grim ferocity of the murder scene, nor have equalled,
perhaps, the tragic shadow of doom which is thrown over Rossetti's poem
by the triple warning of the weird woman. But the sense of the historic
environment, the sense of the actual in places and persons, would have
been stronger in his version. Graeme's retreat would have been the
Perthshire Highlands, and not vaguely "the land of the wild Scots." And
if scenery had been used, it would not have been such as this--a
Pre-Raphaelite background:
"That eve was clenched for a boding storm,
'Neath a toilsome moon half seen;
The cloud stooped low and the surf rose high;
And where there was a line of the sky,
Wild wings loomed dark between."
The historical sense was weak in Rossetti. It is not easy to imagine him
composing a Waverley novel. The life of the community, as distinct from
the life of the individual, had little interest for him. The mellifluous
names of his heroines, Aloyse, Rose Mary, Blanchelys, are pure romance.
In his intense concentration upon the aesthetic aspects of every subject,
Rossetti seemed, to those who came in contact with him, singularly
_borné_. He was indifferent to politics, society, speculative thought,
and the discoveries of modern science--to contemporary matters in
general.[23] It is to this narrow aestheticism that Mr. Courthope refers
when, in comparing Coleridge and Keats with Rossetti and Swinburne, he
finds in the latter an "extraordinary skill in the imitation of antique
forms," but "less liberty of imagination." [24] The contrast is most
striking in the case of Coleridge, whose intellectual interests had so
wide a range. Rossetti cared only for Coleridge's verse; William Morris
spoke with contempt of everything that he had written except two or three
of his poems;[25] and Swinburne regretted that he had lost himself in the
mazes of theology and philosophy, instead of devoting himself wholly to
creative work. Keats, it is true, was exclusively preoccupied with the
beautiful; but he was more eclectic than Rossetti--perhaps also than
Morris, though hardly than Swinburne. The world of classic fable, the
world of outward nature were as dear to his imagination as the country of
romance. Rossetti was not university bred, and, as we have seen, forgot
his Greek early. Morris, like Swinburne, was an Oxford man; yet we hear
him saying that he "loathes all classical art and literature." [26] In
"The Life and Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise" he treats
classical and mediaeval subjects impartially, but treats them both alike
in mediaeval fashion; as Chaucer does, in "The Knightes Tale." [27] As
for Rossetti, he is never classical. He makes Pre-Raphaelite ballads out
of the tale of Troy divine and the Rabbinical legends of Adam's first
wife, Lilith; ballads with quaint burdens--
"(O Troy's down,
Tall Troy's on fire)";
"(Sing Eden Bower!
Alas the hour!)"
and whose very titles have an Old English familiarity--"Eden Bower,"
"Troy Town," as who says "London Bridge," "Edinboro' Town," etc.
Swinburne has given the _rationale_ of this type of art in his
description of a Bacchus and Ariadne by Lippino Lippi ("Old Masters at
Florence"), "an older legend translated and transformed into mediaeval
shape. More than any others, these painters of the early Florentine
school reproduce in their own art the style of thought and work familiar
to a student of Chaucer and his fellows or pupils. Nymphs have faded
into fairies, and gods subsided into men. A curious realism has grown up
out of that very ignorance and perversion which seemed as if it could not
but falsify whatever thing it touched upon. This study of Fillippino's
has all the singular charm of the romantic school. . . . The clear form
has gone, the old beauty dropped out of sight . . . but the mediaeval or
romantic form has an incommunicable charm of its own. . . . Before
Chaucer could give us a Pandarus or a Cressida, all knowledge and memory
of the son of Lycaon and the daughter of Chryses must have died out, the
whole poem collapsed into romance; but far as these may be removed from
the true tale and the true city of Troy, they are not phantoms."
But of all this group, the one most thoroughly steeped in
mediaevalism--to repeat his own description of himself--was William
Morris. He was the English equivalent of Gautier's _homme moyen âge_;
and it was his endeavour, in letters and art, to pick up and continue the
mediaeval tradition, interrupted by four hundred years of modern
civilisation. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not attract
him; and as for the eighteenth, it simply did not exist for him.[28] The
ugliness of modern life, with its factories and railroads, its
unpicturesque poverty and selfish commercialism, was hateful to him as it
was to Ruskin--his teacher. He loved to imagine the face of England as
it was in the time of Chaucer--his master; to
"Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston smoke, . . .
And dream of London, small and white and clean,
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green."
The socialistic Utopia depicted in his "News from Nowhere" (1890) is a
regenerated Middle Age, without feudalism, monarchy, and the mediaeval
Church, but also without densely populated cities, with handicrafts
substituted for manufactures, and with mediaeval architecture, house,
decoration, and costume. None of Morris' books deals with modern life,
but all of them with an imaginary future or an almost equally imaginary
past. This same "News from Nowhere" contains a passage of dialogue in
justification of retrospective romance. "'How is it that though we are
so interested with our life for the most part, yet when people take to
writing poems or painting pictures they seldom deal with our modern life,
or if they do, take good care to make their poems or pictures unlike that
life? Are we not good enough to paint ourselves?' . . . 'It always was
so, and I suppose always will be,' said he, 'however, it may be
explained. It is true that in the nineteenth century, when there was so
little art and so much talk about it, there was a theory that art and
imaginative literature ought to deal with contemporary life; but they
never did so; for, if there was any pretence of it, the author always
took care . . . to disguise, or exaggerate, or idealise, and in some way
or another make it strange; so that, for all the verisimilitude there
was, he might just as well have dealt with the times of the
Pharaohs.'" [29]
The difference between the mediaevalism of Rossetti and of Morris
illustrates, in an interesting way, the varied results produced by the
operation of similar influences on contrasted temperaments. The
comparison which Morris' biographer makes between him and Burne-Jones
holds true as between Morris and Rossetti: "They received or
re-incarnated the Middle Ages through the eyes and brain, in the one case
of a Norman, in the other of a Florentine." Morris was twice a Norman,
in his love for the romancers and Gothic builders of northern France; and
in his enthusiasm for the Icelandic sagas. His visits to Italy left him
cold, and he confessed to a strong preference for the art of the North.
"With the later work of Southern Europe I am quite out of sympathy. In
spite of its magnificent power and energy, I feel it as an enemy, and
this much more in Italy, where there is such a mass of it, than
elsewhere. Yes, and even in these magnificent and wonderful towns I long
rather for the heap of gray stones with a gray roof that we call a house
north-away." Rossetti's Italian subtlety and mysticism are replaced in
Morris by an English homeliness--a materialism which is Teutonic and not
Latin or Celtic, and one surface indication of which is the scrupulously
Saxon vocabulary of his poems and prose romances. "His earliest
enthusiasms," said Burne-Jones, "were his latest. The thirteenth century
was his ideal period always"--the century which produced the lovely
French romances which he translated and the great French cathedrals which
he admired above all other architecture on earth. But this admiration
was aesthetic rather than religious. The Catholic note, so resonant in
Rossetti's poetry, is hardly audible in Morris, at least after his early
Oxford days. The influence of Newman still lingered at Oxford in the
fifties, though the Tractarian movement had spent its force and a
reaction had set in. Morris came up to the university an Anglo-Catholic,
and like his fellow-student and life-long friend, Burne-Jones, had been
destined to holy orders. We find them both, as undergraduates, eagerly
reading the "Acta Sanctorum," the "Tracts for the Times," and Kenelm
Digby's "Mores Catholici," and projecting a kind of monastic community,
where celibacy should be practised and sacred art cultivated. But later
impressions soon crowded out this early religious fervour. Churchly
asceticism and the mediaeval "praise of virginity" made no part of
Morris' social ideal. The body counted for much with him. In "News from
Nowhere," marriage even is so far from being a sacrament, that it is
merely a free arrangement terminable at the will of either party. Morris
had a passionate love of earth and a regard for the natural instincts.
He complains that Swinburne's poetry is "founded on literature, not on
nature." His religion is a reversion to the old Teutonic pagan
earth-worship, and he had the pagan dread of "quick-coming death." His
paradise is an "Earthly Paradise"; it is in search of earthly immortality
that his voyagers set sail. "Of heaven or hell," says his prelude, "I
have no power to sing"; and the great mediaeval singer of heaven and hell
who meant so much to Rossetti, appealed hardly more to Morris than to
Walter Scott.
Moreover, Morris' work in verse was the precise equivalent of his work as
a decorative artist, who cared little for easel pictures, and regarded
painting as one method out of many for covering wall spaces or other
surfaces.[30] His poetry is mainly narrative, but whether epical or
lyrical in form, is always less lyric in essence than Rossetti's. In its
objective spirit and even distribution of emphasis, it contrasts with
Rossetti's expressional intensity very much as Morris' wall-paper and
tapestry designs contrast with paintings like "Beata Beatrix" and
"Proserpina." Morris--as an artist--cared more for places and things
than for people; and his interest was in the work of art itself, not in
the personality of the artist.
Quite unlike as was Morris to Scott in temper and mental endowment, his
position in the romantic literature of the second half-century answers
very closely to Scott's in the first. His work resembled Scott's in
volume, and in its easiness for the general reader. For the second time
he made the Middle Ages _popular_. There was nothing esoteric in his
art, as in Rossetti's. It was English and came home to Englishmen. His
poetry, like his decorative work, was meant for the people, and
"understanded of the people." Moreover, like Scott, he was an
accomplished _raconteur_, and a story well told is always sure of an
audience. His first volume, "The Defence of Guenevere" (1858), dedicated
to Rossetti and inspired by him, had little popular success. But when,
like Millais, he abandoned the narrowly Pre-Raphaelite manner and
broadened out, in "The Life and Death of Jason" (1867) and "The Earthly
Paradise" (1868-70), into a fashion of narrative less caviare to the
general, the public response was such as met Millais.
Morris' share in the Pre-Raphaelite movement was in the special field of
decorative art. His enthusiasm for Gothic architecture had been aroused
at Oxford by a reading of Ruskin's chapter on "The Nature of Gothic" in
"The Stones of Venice." In 1856, acting upon this impulse, he articled
himself to the Oxford architect G. E. Street, and began work in his
office. He did not persevere in the practice of the profession, and
never built a house. But he became and remained a _connoisseur_ of
Gothic architecture and an active member of the Society for the
Protection of Ancient Buildings. His numerous visits to Amiens,
Chartres, Reims, Soissons, and Rouen were so many pilgrimages to the
shrines of mediaeval art. Indeed, he always regarded the various
branches of house decoration as contributory to the master art,
architecture.
A little later, under the dominating and somewhat overbearing persuasions
of Rossetti, he tried his hand at painting, but never succeeded well in
drawing the human face and figure. The figure designs for his stained
glass, tapestries, etc., were usually made by Burne-Jones, Morris
furnishing floriated patterns and the like. In 1861 was formed the firm
of Morris & Company, which revolutionised English household decoration.
Rossetti and Burne-Jones were among the partners in this concern, which
undertook to supply the public with high art work in wall painting, paper
hangings, embroidery, carpets, tapestries, printed cottons, stamped
leather, carved furniture, tiles, metals, jewelry, etc. In particular,
Morris revived the mediaeval arts of glass-staining, illumination, or
miniature painting, and tapestry-weaving with the high-warp loom. Though
he chose to describe himself as a "dreamer of dreams born out of my due
time," and "the idle singer of an empty day," he was a tireless practical
workman of astonishing cleverness and versatility. He taught himself to
dye and weave. When, in the last decade of the century, he set up the
famous Kelmscott Press, devoted to artistic printing and book-making, he
studied the processes of type-casting and paper manufacture, and actually
made a number of sheets of paper with his own hands. It was his
favourite idea that the division of labour in modern manufactures had
degraded the workman by making him a mere machine; that the divorce
between the art of the designer and the art of the handicraftsman was
fatal to both. To him the Middle Ages meant, not the ages of faith, or
of chivalry, or of bold and free adventure, but of popular art--of "The
Lesser Arts"; when every artisan was an artist of the beautiful and took
pleasure in the thing which his hand shaped; when not only the cathedral
and the castle, but the townsman's dwelling-house and the labourer's
cottage was a thing of beauty. He believed that in those times there
was, as there should be again, an art by the people and for the people.
It was the democratic and not the aristocratic elements of mediaeval life
that he praised. "From the first dawn of history till quite modern
times, art, which nature meant to solace all, fulfilled its purpose; all
men shared in it; that was what made life romantic, as people call it, in
those days; that and not robber-barons and inaccessible kings with their
hierarchy of serving-nobles and other such rubbish." [31] One more
passage will serve to set in sharp contrast the romanticism of Scott and
the romanticism of Ruskin and Morris. "With that literature in which
romance, that is to say humanity, was re-born, there sprang up also a
feeling for the romance of external nature, which is surely strong in us
now, joined with a longing to know something real of the lives of those
who have gone before us; of these feelings united you will find the
broadest expression in the pages of Walter Scott; it is curious, as
showing how sometimes one art will lag behind another in a revival, that
the man who wrote the exquisite and wholly unfettered naturalism of 'The
Heart of Midlothian,' for instance, thought himself continually bound to
seem to feel ashamed of, and to excuse himself for, his love of Gothic
architecture; he felt that it was romantic, and he knew that it gave him
pleasure, but somehow he had not found out that it was art, having been
taught in many ways that nothing could be art that was not done by a
named man under academical rules." [32]
It is worth while to glance at Morris' culture-history and note the
organic filaments which connect the later with the earlier romanticism.
He had read the Waverley novels as a child, and had even snatched a
fearful joy from Clara Reeve's "Old English Baron." [33] He knew his
Tennyson before he went up to Oxford, but reserved an unqualified
admiration only for such things as "Oriana" and "The Lady of Shalott."
He was greatly excited by the woodcut engraving of Dürer's "Knight, Death
and the Devil" in an English translation of Fouqué's "Sintram." [34]
Rossetti was first made known to him by Ruskin's Edinburgh lectures of
1854 and by the illustration to Allingham's "Maids of Elfin Mere," over
which Morris and Burne-Jones "pored continually." Morris devoured
greedily all manner of mediaeval chronicles and romances, French and
English; but he read little in Elizabethan and later authors. He
disliked Milton and Wordsworth, and held Keats to be the foremost of
modern English poets. He took no interest in mythology, or Welsh poetry
or Celtic literature generally, with the exception of the "Morte
Darthur," which, Rossetti assured him, was second only to the Bible. The
Border ballads had been his delight since childhood. An edition of
these; a selection of English mediaeval lyrics; and a "Morte Darthur,"
with a hundred illustrations from designs by Burne-Jones, were among the
unfulfilled purposes of the Kelmscott Press.
Morris' first volume, "The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems," was put
forth in 1858 (reprint in 1875); "a book," says Saintsbury, "almost as
much the herald of the second school of Victorian poetry as Tennyson's
early work was of the first." [35] "Many of the poems," wrote William
Bell Scott, "represent the mediaeval spirit in a new way, not by a
sentimental, nineteenth-century-revival mediaevalism, but they give a
poetical sense of a barbaric age strongly and sharply real." [36] These
last words point at Tennyson. The first four pieces in the volume are on
Arthurian subjects, but are wholly different in style and conception even
from such poems as "The Lady of Shalott" and "Sir Lancelot and Queen
Guinevere." They are more mannerised, more in the spirit of
Pre-Raphaelite art, than anything in Morris' later work. If the
name-poem is put beside Tennyson's idyl "Guinevere"; or "Sir Galahad, a
Christmas Mystery," beside Tennyson's "Sir Galahad," the difference is
striking. In place of the refined ethics and sentiment, and purely
modern spiritual ideals which find a somewhat rhetorical expression in
Tennyson, Morris endeavours to render the genuine Catholic mediaeval
materialistic religious temper as it appears in Malory; where
unquestioning belief, devotion, childish superstition, and the fear of
hell coexist with fleshly love and hate--a passion of sin and a passion
of repentance. Guenevere's "defence" is, at bottom, the same as Phryne's:
"See through my long throat how the words go up
In ripples to my mouth: how in my hand
The shadow lies like wine within a cup
Of marvellously colour'd gold."
"Dost thou reck
That I am beautiful, Lord, even as you
And your dear mother?" [37]
Morris criticised Tennyson's Galahad, as "rather a mild youth." His own
Galahad is not the rapt seer of the vision beatific, but a more
flesh-and-blood character, who sometimes has cold fits in which he doubts
whether the quest is not a fool's errand; and whether even Sir Palomydes
in his unrequited love, and Sir Lancelot in his guilty love, do not take
greater comfort than he.
Other poems in the book were inspired by Froissart's "Chronicle" or other
histories of the English wars in France: "Sir Peter Harpdon's End,"
"Concerning Geffray Teste Noire," "The Eve of Crecy," etc.[38] Still
others, and these not the least fascinating, were things of pure
invention, lays of "a country lit with lunar rainbows and ringing with
fairy song." [39] These have been thought to owe something to Edgar Poe,
but they much more nearly resemble the work of the latest symbolistic
schools. When reading such poems as "Rapunzel," "Golden Wings," and "The
Tune of Seven Towers," one is frequently reminded of "Serres Chaudes" or
"Pelléas et Mélisande"; and is at no loss to understand why Morris
excepted Maeterlinck from his general indifference to contemporary
writers--Maeterlinck, like himself, a student of Rossetti. There is no
other collection of English poems so saturated with Pre-Raphaelitism.
The flowers are all orchids, strange in shape, violent in colouring.
Rapunzel, _e.g._, is like one of Maeterlinck's spellbound princesses.
She stands at the top of her tower, letting down her hair to the ground,
and her lover climbs up to her by it as by a golden stair. Here is again
the singular Pre-Raphaelite and symbolistic scenery, with its images from
art and not from nature. Tall damozels in white and scarlet walk in
garths of lily and sunflower, or under apple boughs, and feed the swans
in the moat.
"Moreover, she held scarlet lilies, such
As Maiden Margaret bears upon the light
Of the great church walls." [40]
"Lord, give Mary a dear kiss,
And let gold Michael, who look'd down,
When I was there, on Rouen town,
From the spire, bring me that kiss
On a lily!" [41]
The language is as artfully quaint as the imaginations are fantastic:
"Between the trees a large moon, the wind lows
Not loud, but as a cow begins to low." [42]
"Pale in the green sky were the stars, I ween,
Because the moon shone like a star she shed
When she dwelt up in heaven a while ago,
And ruled all things but God." [43]
"Quiet groans
That swell out the little bones
Of my bosom." [44]
"I sit on a purple bed,
Outside, the wall is red,
Thereby the apple hangs,
And the wasp, caught by the fangs,
Dies in the autumn night.
And the bat flits till light,
And the love-crazed knight
Kisses the long, wet grass." [45]
A number of these pieces are dramatic in form, monologues or dialogues,
sometimes in the manner of the mediaeval mystery plays.[46] Others are
ballads, not of the popular variety, but after Rossetti's fashion,
employing burdens, English or French:
"Two red roses across the moon";
"Hah! hah! la belle jaune giroflée";
"Ah! qu'elle est belle La Marguerite"; etc.
The only poem in the collection which imitates the style of the old
minstrel ballad is "Welland Water." The name-poem is in _terza rima_;
the longest, "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," in blank verse; "Golden Wings,"
in the "In Memoriaro" stanza.
When Morris again came before the public as a poet, his style had
undergone a change akin to that which transformed the Pre-Raphaelite
painter into the decorative artist. The skeins of vivid romantic colour
had run out into large-pattern tapestries. There was nothing eccentric
or knotty about "The Life and Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise."
On the contrary, nothing so facile, pellucid, pleasant to read had
appeared in modern literature--a poetic lubberland, a "clear, unwrinkled
song." The reader was carried along with no effort and little thought on
the long swell of the verse, his ear lulled by the musical lapse of the
rime, his eye soothed--not excited--by ever-unrolling panoramas of an
enchanted country "east of the sun and west of the moon." Morris wrote
with incredible ease and rapidity. It was a maxim with him, as with
Ruskin, that all good work is done easily and with pleasure to the
workman; and certainly that seems true of him which Lowell said of
Chaucer--that he never "puckered his brow over an unmanageable verse."
Chaucer was his avowed master,[47] and perhaps no English narrative poet
has come so near to Chaucer. Like Chaucer, and unlike Scott, he did not
invent stories, but told the old stories over again with a new charm.
His poetry, as such, is commonly better than Scott's; lacking the fire
and nervous energy of Scott in his great passages, but sustained at a
higher artistic level. He had the copious vein of the mediaeval
chroniclers and romancers, without their tiresome prolixity and with
finer resources of invention. He had none of Chaucer's humour, realism,
or skill in character sketching. In its final impression his poetry
resembles Spenser's more than Chaucer's. Like Spenser's, it grows
monotonous--without quite growing languid--from the steady flow of the
metre and the exhaustless profusion of the imagery. The reader becomes,
somewhat ungratefully, surfeited with beauty, and seeks relief in poetry
more passionate or intellectual. Chaucer and, in a degree, Walter Scott,
have a way of making old things seem near to us. In Spenser and Morris,
though bright and clear in all imagined details, they stand at an
infinite remove, in a world apart--
"--a little isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea"
which typifies the weary problems and turmoil of contemporary life.
"Jason" was a poem of epic dimensions, on the winning of the Golden
Fleece; "The Earthly Paradise," a series of twenty-four narrative poems
set in a framework of the poet's own. Certain gentlemen of Norway, in
the reign of Edward III. of England, set out--like St. Brandan--on a
voyage in search of a land that is free from death. They cross the
Western ocean, and after long years of wandering, come, disappointed of
their hope, to a city founded centuries since by exiles from ancient
Greece. There being hospitably received, hosts and guests interchange
tales in every month of the year; a classical story alternating with a
mediaeval one, till the double sum of twelve is complete. Among the
wanderers are a Breton and a Suabian, so that the mediaeval tales have a
wide range. There are Norse stories like "The Lovers of Gudrun"; French
Charlemagne romances, like "Ogier the Dane"; and late German legends of
the fourteenth century, like "The Hill of Venus," besides miscellaneous
travelled fictions of the Middle Age.[48] But the Hellenic legends are
reduced to a common term with the romance material, so that the reader is
not very sensible of a difference. Many of them are selected for their
marvellous character, and abound in dragons, monsters, transformations,
and enchantments: "The Golden Apples," "Bellerophon," "Cupid and Psyche,"
"The Story of Perseus," etc. Even "Jason" is treated as a romance. Of
its seventeen books, all but the last are devoted to the exploits and
wanderings of the Argonauts. Medea is not the wronged, vengeful queen of
the Greek tragic poets, so much as she is the Colchian sorceress who
effects her lover's victory and escape. Her romantic, outweighs her
dramatic character. Sea voyages, emprizes, and wild adventures, like
those of his own wanderers in "The Earthly Paradise," were dearer to
Morris' imagination than conflicts of the will; the _vostos_ or
home-coming of Ulysses, _e.g._ He preferred the "Odyssey" to the
"Iliad," and translated it in 1887 into the thirteen-syllabled line of
the "Nibelungenlied." [49] Of the Greek tales in "The Earthly Paradise,"
"The Love of Alcestis" has, perhaps, the most dramatic quality.
Like Chaucer and like Rossetti,[50] Morris mediaevalised classic fable.
"Troy," says his biographer, "is to his imagination a town exactly like
Bruges or Chartres, spired and gabled, red-roofed, filled (like the city
of King Aeetes in 'The Life and Death of Jason') with towers and swinging
bells. The Trojan princes go out, like knights in Froissart, to tilt at
the barriers." [51] The distinction between classical and romantic
treatment is well illustrated by a comparison of Theocritus' idyl
"Hylas," with the same episode in "Jason." "Soon was he 'ware of a
spring," says the Syracusan poet, "in a hollow land, and the rushes grew
thickly round it, and dark swallow-wort, and green maiden-hair, and
blooming parsley and deer-grass spreading through the marshy land. In
the midst of the water the nymphs were arraying their dances, the
sleepless nymphs, dread goddesses of the country people, Eunice, and
Malis, and Nycheia, with her April eyes. And now the boy was holding out
the wide-mouthed pitcher to the water, intent on dipping it; but the
nymphs all clung to his hand, for love of the Argive lad had fluttered
the soft hearts of all of them. Then down he sank into the black
water." [52] In "Jason," where the episode occupies some two hundred and
seventy lines, one of the nymphs meets the boy in the wood, disguised in
furs like a northern princess, and lulls him to sleep by the stream side
with a Pre-Raphaelite song:
"I know a little garden close
Set thick with lily and red rose";
the loveliest of all the lyrical passages in Morris' narrative poems
except possibly the favourite two-part song in "Ogier the Dane";
"In the white-flower'd hawthorne brake,
Love, be merry for my sake:
Twine the blossoms in my hair.
Kiss me where I am most fair--
Kiss me, love! for who knoweth
What thing cometh after death?"
This is the strain which recurs in all Morris' poetry with the insistence
of a burden, and lends its melancholy to every season of "the rich year
slipping by."
Three kinds of verse are employed in "The Earthly Paradise": the
octosyllabic couplet; the rime royal, which was so much a favourite with
Chaucer; and the heroic couplet, handled in the free, "enjambed" fashion
of Hunt and Keats.
"Love is Enough," in the form of a fifteenth-century morality play, and
treating a subject from the "Mabinogion," appeared in 1873, Mackail
praises its delicate mechanism in the use of "receding planes of action"
(Love is prologue and chorus, and there is a musical accompaniment); but
the dramatic form only emphasises the essentially undramatic quality of
the author's genius. What is the matter with Morris' poetry? For
something is the matter with it. Beauty is there in abundance, a rich
profusion of imagery. The narrative moves without a hitch. Passion is
not absent, passionate love and regret; but it speaks a sleepy language,
and the final impression is dream-like. I believe that the singular lack
which one feels in reading these poems comes from Morris' dislike of
rhetoric and moralising, the two main nerves of eighteenth-century verse.
Left to themselves, these make sad work of poetry; yet poetry includes
eloquence, and life includes morality. The poetry of Morris is sensuous,
as upon the whole poetry should be; but in his resolute abstention from
the generalizing habit of the previous century, the balance is lost
between the general and the concrete, which all really great poetry
preserves. Byron declaims and Wordsworth moralises, both of them perhaps
too much; yet in the end to the advantage of their poetry, which is full
of truths, or of thoughts conceived as true, surcharged with emotion and
uttered with passionate conviction. One looks in vain in Morris' pages
for such things as
"There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away";
or
"--the good die first,
----And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust,
Burn to the socket."
Such coin of universal currency is rare in Morris, as has once before
been said. Not that quotability is an absolute test of poetic value, for
then Pope would rank higher than Spenser or Shelley. But its absence in
Morris is significant in more than one way.
While "The Earthly Paradise" was in course of composition, a new
intellectual influence came into Morris' life, the influence of the
Icelandic sagas. Much had been done to make Old Norse literature
accessible to English readers since the days when Gray put forth his
Runic scraps and Percy translated Mallet.[53] Walter Scott, e.g., had
given an abstract of the "Eyrbyggja Saga." Amos Cottle had published at
Bristol in 1797 a metrical version of the mythological portion of the
"Elder Edda" ("Icelandic Poetry, or the Edda of Saemund"), with an
introductory verse epistle by Southey. Sir George Dasent's translation
of the "Younger Edda" appeared in 1842; Laing's "Heimskringla" in 1844;
Dasent's "Burnt Nial" in 1861; his "Gisli the Outlaw," and Head's "Saga
of Viga-Glum" in 1866. William and Mary Howitt's "Literature and Romance
of Northern Europe" appeared in 1852. Morris had made the acquaintance
of Thorpe's "Northern Mythology" (1851) and "Yuletide Stories" (1853) at
Oxford; two of the tales in "The Earthly Paradise" were suggested by
them: "The Land East of the Sun" and "The Fostering of Aslaug." These,
however, he had dealt with independently and in an ultra-romantic spirit.
But in 1869 he took up the study of Icelandic under the tuition of Mr.
Erick Magnusson; in collaboration with whom he issued a number of
translations.[54] "The Lovers of Gudrun" in "The Earthly Paradise" was
taken from the "Laxdaela Saga," and is in marked contrast with the other
poems in the collection. There is no romantic glamour about it. It is a
grim, domestic tragedy, moving among the homeliest surroundings. Save
for the lawlessness of a primitive state of society which gave free play
to the workings of the passions, the story might have passed in Yorkshire
or New England. A book like "Wuthering Heights," or "Pembroke,"
occasionally exhibits the same obstinate Berserkir rage of the tough old
Teutonic stock, operating under modern conditions. For the men and women
of the sagas are hard as iron; their pride is ferocious, their courage
and sense of duty inflexible, their hatred is as enduring as their love.
The memory of a slight or an injury is nursed for a lifetime, and when
the hour of vengeance strikes, no compunction, not even the commonest
human instincts--such as mother love--can avert the blow. Signy in the
"Völsunga Saga" is implacable as fate. To avenge the slaughter of the
Volsungs is with her an obsession, a fixed idea. When incest seems the
only pathway to her purpose, she takes that path without a moment's
hesitation. The contemptuous indifference with which she hands over her
own little innocent children to death is more terrible than the readiness
of the fierce Medea to sacrifice her young brothers to Jason's safety;
more terrible by far than the matricide of Orestes.
The colossal mythology of the North had impressed Gray's imagination a
century before, Carlyle in his "Hero Worship" (1840) had given it the
preference over the Greek, as an expression of race character and
imagination. In the preface to his translation of the "Völsunga Saga,"
Morris declared his surprise that no version of the story yet existed in
English. He said that it was one of the great stories of the world, and
that to all men of Germanic blood it ought to be what the tale of Troy
had been to the whole Hellenic race. In 1876 he cast it into a poem,
"Sigurd the Volsung," in four books in riming lines of six iambic or
anapaestic feet. "The Lovers of Gudrun" drew its material from one of
that class of sagas which rest upon historical facts. The family
vendetta which it narrates, in the Iceland of the eleventh century, is
hardly more fabulous--hardly less realistic--than any modern blood feud
in the Tennessee mountains. The passions and dramatic situations are
much the same in both. The "Völsunga Saga" belongs not to romantic
literature, strictly speaking, but to the old cycle of hero epics, to
that earlier Middle Age which preceded Christian chivalry. It is the
Scandinavian version of the story of the Niblungs, which Wagner's
music-dramas have rendered in another art. But in common with romance,
it abounds in superhuman wonders. It is full of Eddaic poetry and
mythology. Sigmund and Sinfiotli change themselves into were wolves,
like the people in "William of Palermo": Sigurd slays Fafnir, the dragon
who guards the hoard, and his brother Regni, the last of the Dwarf-kin;
Grimhild bewitches Sigurd with a cup of evil drink; Sigmund draws from
the hall pillar the miraculous sword of Odin, and its shards are
afterwards smithed by Regni for the killing of the monster.
Morris was so powerfully drawn to the Old Norse literature that he made
two visits to Iceland, to verify the local references in the sagas and to
acquaint himself with the strange Icelandic landscapes whose savage
sublimity is reflected in the Icelandic writings. "Sigurd the Volsung"
is probably the most important contribution of Norse literature to
English poetry; but it met with no such general acceptance as "The
Earthly Paradise." The spirit which created the Northern mythology and
composed the sagas is not extinct in the English descendants of Frisians
and Danes. There is something of it in the minstrel ballads; but it has
been so softened by modern life and tempered with foreign culture
elements, that these old tales in their aboriginal, barbaric sternness
repel. It is hard for any blossom of modern poetry to root itself in the
scoriae of Hecla.
An indirect result of Morris' Icelandic studies was his translation of
Beowulf (1897), not a success; another was the remarkable series of prose
poems or romances, which he put forth in the last ten years of his
life.[55] There is nothing else quite like these. They are written in a
peculiar archaic English which the author shaped for himself out of
fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century models, like the "Morte Darthur"
and the English translation of the "Gesta Roroanorum," but with an
anxious preference for the Saxon and Danish elements of the vocabulary.
It is a dialect in which a market town is called a "cheaping-stead," a
popular assembly a "folk-mote," foresters are "wood-abiders," sailors are
"ship-carles," a family is a "kindred," poetry is "song-craft," [56] and
any kind of enclosure is a "garth." The prose is frequently interchanged
with verse, not by way of lyrical outbursts, but as a variation in the
narrative method, after the manner of the Old French _cantefables_, such
as "Aucassin et Nicolete"; but more exactly after the manner of the
sagas, in which the azoic rock of Eddaic poetry crops out ever and anon
under the prose strata. This Saxonism of style is in marked contrast
with Scott, who employs without question the highly latinised English
which his age had inherited from the last. Nor are Morris' romances
historical in the manner of the Waverley novels. The first two of the
series, however, are historical in the sense that they endeavour to
reproduce in exact detail the picture of an extinct society. Time and
place are not precisely indicated, but the scene is somewhere in the old
German forest, and the period is early in the Christian era, during the
obscure wanderings and settlements of the Gothic tribes. "The House of
the Wolfings" concerns the life of such a community, which has made a
series of clearings in "Mirkwood" on a stream tributary to the Rhine.
The folk of Midmark live very much as Tacitus describes the ancient
Germans as living. Each kindred dwells in a great common hall, like the
hall of the Niblungs or the Volsungs, or of King Hrothgar in "Beowulf."
Their herding and agriculture are described, their implements and
costumes, feasts in hall, songs, rites of worship, public meetings, and
finally their warfare when they go forth against the invading Romans. In
"The Roots of the Mountains" the tribe of the Wolf has been driven into
the woods and mountains by the vanguard of the Hunnish migrations. In
time they make head against these, drive them back, and retake their
fertile valley. In each case there is a love story and, as in Scott, the
private fortunes of the hero and heroine are enwoven with the ongoings of
public events. But it is the general life of the tribe that is of
importance, and there is little individual characterisation. There is a
class of thralls in "The House of the Wolfings," but no single member of
the class is particularised, like Garth, the thrall of Cedric, in
"Ivanhoe."
The later numbers of the series have no semblance of actuality. The last
of all, indeed, "The Sundering Flood," is a war story which attains an
air of geographical precision by means of a map--like the plan of Egdon
Heath in "The Return of the Native"--but the region and its inhabitants
are alike fabulous. Romances such as "The Water of the Wondrous Isles"
and "The Wood beyond the World" (the names are not the least imaginative
feature of these curious books) are simply a new kind of fairy tales.
Unsubstantial as Duessa or Armida or Circe or Morgan le Fay are the
witch-queen of the Wood beyond the World and the sorceress of the
enchanted Isle of Increase Unsought. The white Castle of the Quest, with
its three champions and their ladies, Aurea, Atra, and Viridis; the
yellow dwarfs, the magic boat, the wicked Red Knight, and his den, the
Red Hold; the rings and spells and charms and garments of invisibility
are like the wilder parts of Malory or the Arabian Nights.
Algernon Charles Swinburne was an early adherent of the Pre-Raphaelite
school, although such of his work as is specifically Gothic is to be
found mainly in the first series of "Poems and Ballads" (1866);[57] a
volume which corresponds to Morris' first fruits, "The Defence of
Guenevere." If Morris is prevailingly a Goth--a heathen Norseman or
Saxon--Swinburne is, upon the whole, a Greek pagan. Rossetti and Morris
inherit from Keats, but Swinburne much more from Shelley, whom he
resembles in his Hellenic spirit; as well as in his lyric fervour, his
shrill radicalism--political and religious--and his unchastened
imagination. Probably the cunningest of English metrical artists, his
art is more closely affiliated with music than with painting. Not that
there is any paucity of imagery in his poetry; the imagery is
superabundant, crowded, but it is blurred by an iridescent spray of
melodious verbiage. The confusion of mind which his work often produces
does not arise from romantic vagueness, from the dreamlike and mysterious
impression left by a ballad of Coleridge's or a story of Tieck's, but
rather, as in Shelley's case, from the dizzy splendour and excitement of
the diction. His verse, like Shelley's, is full of foam and flame, and
the result upon the reader is to bewilder and exhaust. He does not
describe in pictures, like Rossetti and Morris, but by metaphors,
comparisons, and hyperboles. Take the following very typical
passage--the portrait of Iseult in "Tristram of Lyonesse" (1882);
"The very veil of her bright flesh was made
As of light woven and moonbeam-colored shade
More fine than moonbeams; white her eyelids shone
As snow sun-stricken that endures the sun,
And through their curled and coloured clouds of deep,
Luminous lashes, thick as dreams in sleep,
Shone, as the sea's depth swallowing up the sky's,
The springs of unimaginable eyes.
As the wave's subtler emerald is pierced through
With the utmost heaven's inextricable blue,
And both are woven and molten in one sleight
Of amorous colour and implicated light
Under the golden guard and gaze of noon,
So glowed their aweless amorous plenilune,
Azure and gold and ardent grey, made strange
With fiery difference and deep interchange
Inexplicable of glories multiform;
Now, as the sullen sapphire swells towards storm
Foamless, their bitter beauty grew acold,
And now afire with ardour of fine gold.
Her flower-soft lips were meek and passionate,
For love upon them like a shadow sate
Patient, a foreseen vision of sweet things,
A dream with eyes fast shut and plumeless wings
That knew not what man's love or life should be,
Nor had it sight nor heart to hope or see
What thing should come; but, childlike satisfied,
Watched out its virgin vigil in soft pride
And unkissed expectation; and the glad
Clear cheeks and throat and tender temples had
Such maiden heat as if a rose's blood
Beat in the live heart of a lily-bud."
What distinct image of the woman portrayed does one carry away from all
this squandered wealth of words and tropes? Compare the entire poem with
one of Tennyson's Arthurian "Idyls," or even with Matthew Arnold's not
over-prosperous "Tristram and Iseult," or with any of the stories in "The
Earthly Paradise," and it will be seen how far short it falls of being
good verse narrative--with its excesses of language and retarded
movement. Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere that he could not have
written an epic: "he would have perished from a plethora of thought." It
is not so much plethora of thought as lavishness of style which clogs the
wheels in Swinburne. Too often his tale is
"Like a tale of the little meaning,
Though the words are strong."
But his narrative method has analogies, not only with things like
Shelley's "Laon and Cythna," but with Elizabethan poems such as Marlowe
and Chapman's "Hero and Leander." If not so conceited as these, it is
equally encumbered with sticky sweets which keep the story from getting
forward.
The symbolism which characterises a great deal of Pre-Raphaelite art is
not conspicuous in Swinburne, whose spirit is not mystical. But two
marks of the Pre-Raphaelite--and, indeed, of the romantic manner
generally--are obtrusively present in his early work. One of these is
the fondness for microscopic detail at the expense of the obvious,
natural outlines of the subject. Thus of Proserpine at Enna, in the
piece entitled "At Eleusis,"
"--she lying down, red flowers
Made their sharp little shadows on her sides."
"Endymion" is, perhaps, partly responsible for this exaggeration of the
picturesque, and in Swinburne, as in Keats, the habit is due to an
excessive impressibility by all forms of sensuous beauty. It is a sign
of riches, but of riches which smother their possessor. It is impossible
to fancy Chaucer or Goethe, or any large, healthy mind dealing thus by
its theme. Or, indeed, contrast the whole passage from "At Eleusis" with
the mention of the rape of Proserpine in the "Winter's Tale" and in
"Paradise Lost."
Another Pre-Raphaelite trait is that over-intensify of spirit and sense
which was not quite wholesome in Rossetti, but which manifested itself in
Swinburne in a morbid eroticism. The first series of "Poems and Ballads"
was reprinted in America as "Laus Veneris." The name-poem was a version
of the Tannhäuser legend, a powerful but sultry study of animal passion,
and it set the key of the whole volume. It is hardly necessary to say of
the singer of the wonderful choruses in "Atalanta" and the equally
wonderful hexameters of "Hesperia," that his imagination has turned most
persistently to the antique, and that a very small share of his work is
to be brought under any narrowly romantic formula. But there are a few
noteworthy experiments in mediaevalism included among these early lyrics.
"A Christmas Carol" is a ballad of burdens, suggested by a drawing of
Rossetti's, and full of the Pre-Raphaelite colour. The inevitable
damsels, or bower maidens, are combing out the queen's hair with golden
combs, while she sings a song of God's mother; how she, too, had three
women for her bed-chamber--
"The first two were the two Maries,
The third was Magdalen," [58]
who "was the likest God"; and how Joseph, who, likewise had three
workmen, Peter, Paul, and John, said to the Virgin in regular ballad
style:
"If your child be none other man's,
But if it be very mine,
The bedstead shall be gold two spans,
The bedfoot silver fine."
"The Masque of Queen Bersabe" is a miracle play, and imitates the rough
_naïveté_ of the old Scriptural drama, with its grotesque stage
directions and innocent anachronisms. Nathan recommends King David to
hear a mass. All the _dramatis personae_ swear by Godis rood, by Paulis
head, and Peter's soul, except "Secundus Miles" (_Paganus quidam_), a bad
man--a species of Vice--who swears by Satan and Mahound, and is finally
carried off by the comic devil:
"_S. M._ I rede you in the devil's name,
Ye come not here to make men game;
By Termagaunt that maketh grame,
I shall to-bete thine head.
_Hic Diabolus capiat eum_." [59]
Similarly "St. Dorothy" reproduces the childlike faith and simplicity of
the old martyrologies.[60] Theophilus addresses the Emperor Gabalus with
"Beau Sire, Dieu vous aide." The wicked Gabalus himself, though a
heathen, curses by St. Luke and by God's blood and bones, and quotes
Scripture. Theophilus first catches sight of Dorothy through a latticed
window, holding a green and red psalter among a troop of maidens who play
upon short-stringed lutes. The temple of Venus where he does his
devotions is a "church" with stained-glass windows. Heaven is a walled
pleasance, like the Garden of Delight in the "Roman de la Rose,"
"Thick with companies
Of fair-clothed men that play on shawms and lutes."
Swinburne has also essayed the minstrel ballad in various forms. There
were some half-dozen pieces of the sort in the "Laus Veneris" volume, of
which several, like "The King's Daughter" and "The Sea-Swallows," were
imitations of Rossetti's and Morris' imitations, artistically overwrought
with elaborate Pre-Raphaelite refrains; others, like "May Janet" and "The
Bloody Son," are closer to popular models. The third series of "Poems
and Ballads" (1889) contains nine of these in the Scotch dialect, two of
them Jacobite songs. That Swinburne has a fine instinct in such matters
and holds the true theory of ballad imitation is evident from his review
of Rossetti's and Morris' work in the same kind.[61] "The highest form
of ballad requires, from a poet," he writes, "at once narrative power,
lyrical and dramatic. . . . It must condense the large, loose fluency of
romantic tale-telling into tight and intense brevity. . . . There can be
no pause in a ballad, and no excess; nothing that flags, nothing that
overflows." He pronounces "Sister Helen" the greatest ballad in modern
English; but he thinks that "Stratton Water," which is less independent
in composition, and copies the formal as well as the essential
characteristics of popular poetry, is "a study after the old manner too
close to be no closer. It is not meant for a perfect and absolute piece
of work in the old Border fashion, . . . and yet it is so far a copy that
it seems hardly well to have gone so far and no farther. On this ground
Mr. Morris has a firmer tread than the great artist by the light of whose
genius and kindly guidance he put forth the first fruits of his work, as
I did afterwards. In his first book, the ballad of 'Welland River,' the
Christmas carol in 'The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon,'
etc., . . . are examples of flawless work in the pure early manner. Any
less absolute and decisive revival of mediaeval form . . . rouses some
sense of failure by excess or default of resemblance."
Swinburne's own ballads are clever and learned experiments, but he does
not practise the brevity which he recommends; some of them, such as "The
Bloody Son," "The Weary Wedding," and "The Bride's Tragedy," otherwise
most impressive, would be more so if they were shorter or less wordy.
Though his genius is more lyrical than dramatic, the fascination which
the dramatic method has had for him from the first is as evident in his
ballads as in his series of verse dramas, which begins with "The Queen
Mother," and includes the enormous "Mary Stuart" trilogy. Several of
these are mediaeval in subject; the "Rosamond" of his earliest
volume--Fair Rosamond of the Woodstock Maze--the other "Rosamund, Queen
of the Goths" (1899) in which the period of the action is 573 A.D.; and
"Locrine" (1888), the hero of which is that mythic king of Britain whose
story had been once before dramatised for the Elizabethan stage; and
whose daughter, "Sabrina fair," goddess of the Severn, figures in
"Comus." But these are no otherwise romantic than "Chastelard" or "The
Queen Mother." The dramatic diction is fashioned after the Elizabethans,
of whom Swinburne has been an enthusiastic student and expositor, finding
an attraction even in the morbid horrors of Webster, Ford, and
Tourneur.[62]
Once more the poet touched the Round-Table romances in "The Tale of
Balen" (1896), written in the stanza of "The Lady of Shalott," and in a
style simpler and more direct than "Tristram of Lyonesse." The story is
the same as Tennyson's "Balin and Balan," published with "Tiresias and
Other Poems" in 1885, as an introduction to "Merlin and Vivien." Here
the advantage is in every point with the younger poet. Tennyson's
version is one of the weakest spots in the "Idylls." His hero is a rough
Northumberland warrior who looks with admiration upon the courtly graces
of Lancelot, and borrows a cognisance from Guinevere to wear upon his
shield, in hope that it may help him to keep his temper. But having once
more lost control of this, he throws himself upon the ground
"Moaning 'My violences, my violences!'"--
a bathetic descent not unexampled elsewhere in Tennyson.
This episode of the old "Morte Darthur" has fine tragic possibilities.
It is the tale of two brothers who meet in single combat, with visors
down, and slay each other unrecognised. It has some resemblance,
therefore, to the plan of "Sohrab and Rustum," but it cannot be said that
either poet avails himself of the opportunity for a truly dramatic
presentation of his theme. Tennyson, as we have seen, aimed to give epic
unity to the wandering and repetitious narrative of Malory, by selecting
and arranging his material with reference to one leading conception; the
effort of the king to establish a higher social state through an order of
Christian knighthood, and his failure through the gradual corruption of
the Round Table. He subdues the history of Balin to this purpose, just
as he does the history of Tristram which he relates incidentally only,
and not for its own sake, in "The Last Tournament." Balin's simple faith
in the ideal chivalry of Arthur's court is rudely dispelled when he hears
from Vivien, and sees for himself, that the two chief objects of his
reverence, Lancelot and the queen, are guilty lovers and false to their
lord; and in his bitter disappointment, he casts his life away in the
first adventure that offers. Moreover, in consonance with his main
design, Tennyson seeks, so far as may be, to discard whatever in Malory
is merely accidental or irrational; whatever is stuff of romance rather
than of epic or drama--whose theatre is the human will. To such elements
of the wonderful as he is obliged to retain he gives, where possible, an
allegorical or spiritual significance. There are very strange things in
the story of Balin, such as the invisible knight Garlon, a "darkling
manslayer"; and the chamber in the castle of King Pellam, where the body
of Joseph of Arimathea lies in state, and where there are a portion of
the blood of Christ and the spear with which his heart was pierced, with
which spear Sir Balin smites King Pellam, whereupon the castle falls and
the two adversaries lie among its ruins three days in a deathlike trance.
All this wild magic--which Tennyson touches lightly--Swinburne gives at
full length; following Malory closely through his digressions and the
roving adventures--most of which Tennyson suppresses entirely--by which
he conducts his hero his end. This is the true romantic method.
As Rossetti for the Italian and Morris for the Scandinavian, Swinburne
stands for the spirit of French romanticism. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century France, the inventor of "Gothic" architecture and
chivalry romance, whose literature was the most influential of mediaeval
Europe, still represented everything that is most anti-mediaeval and
anti-romantic. Gérard de Nerval thought that the native genius of France
had been buried under two ages of imported classicism; and that Perrault,
who wrote the fairy tales, was the only really original mind in the
French literature of the eighteenth century. M. Brunetière, on the
contrary, holds that the true expression of the national genius is to be
found in the writers of Louis XIV.'s time--that France is instinctively
and naturally classical. However this may be, in the history of the
modern return to the past, French romanticism was the latest to awake.
Somewhat of the chronicles, fabliaux, and romances of old France had
dribbled into England in translations;[63] but Swinburne was perhaps the
first thoroughpaced disciple of the French romantic school. Victor Hugo
is the god of his idolatry, and he has chanted his praise in prose and
verse, in "ode and elegy and sonnet." [64] Gautier and Baudelaire have
also shared his devotion.[65] The French songs in "Rosamond" and
"Chastelard" are full of romantic spirit. "Laus Veneris" follows a
version of the tale given in Maistre Antoine Gaget's "Livre des grandes
merveilles d'amour" (1530), in which the Venusberg is called "le mont
Horsel"; and "The Leper," a very characteristic piece in the same
collection, is founded on a passage in the "Grandes Chroniques de France"
(1505). Swinburne introduced or revived in English verse a number of old
French stanza forms, such as the ballade, the sestina, the rondel, which
have since grown familiar in the hands of Dobson, Lang, Gosse, and
others. In the second series of "Poems and Ballads" (1878) he gave
translations of ten of the ballads of that musical old blackguard
"Villon, our sad, bad, glad, mad brother's name." [66]
The range of Swinburne's intellectual interests has been wider than that
of Rossetti and Morris. He is a classical scholar, who writes easily in
Latin and Greek. Ancient mythology and modern politics divide his
attention with the romantic literatures of many times and countries.
Rossetti made but one or two essays in prose criticism, and Morris viewed
the reviewer's art with contempt. But Swinburne has contributed freely
to critical literature, an advocate of the principles of romantic art in
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as Coleridge, Lamb, and
Hazlitt had been in the first. The manner of his criticism is not at all
judicial. His prose is as lyrical as his verse, and his praise and blame
both in excess--dithyrambic laudation or affluent billingsgate. In
particular, he works the adjective "divine" so hard that it loses
meaning. Yet stripped of its excited superlatives, and reduced to the
cool temperature of ordinary speech, his critical work is found to be
full of insight, and his judgment in matters of poetical technique almost
always right. I may close this chapter with a few sentences of his
defence of retrospective literature.[67] "It is but waste of breath for
the champions of the other party to bid us break the yoke and cast off
the bondage of that past, leave the dead to bury their dead, and turn
from the dust and rottenness of old-world themes, epic or romantic,
classical or feudal, to face the age wherein we live. . . . In vain, for
instance, do the first poetess of England and the first poet of America
agree to urge upon their fellows or their followers the duty of
confronting and expressing the spirit and the secret of their own time,
its meaning, and its need. . . . If a poem cast in the mould of classic
or feudal times, of Greek drama or mediaeval romance, be lifeless and
worthless, it is not because the subject or the form was ancient, but
because the poet was inadequate. . . . For neither epic nor romance of
chivalrous quest or classic war is obsolete yet, or ever can be; there is
nothing in the past extinct . . . [Life] is omnipresent and eternal, and
forsakes neither Athens nor Jerusalem, Camelot nor Troy, Argonaut nor
Crusader, to dwell, as she does with equal good will, among modern
appliances in London and New York."
[1] See vol. i., chaps. iv. and vii., "The Landscape Poets" and "The
Gothic Revival."
[2] This was the organ of the Pre-Raphaelites, started in 1850. Only
four numbers were issued (January, February, March, April), and in the
third and fourth the title was changed to _Art and Poetry_. The contents
included, among other things, poems by Dante Gabriel and Christina
Rossetti. One of the former's twelve contributions was "The Blessed
Damozel." The _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, which ran through the
year 1856 and was edited by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, was
also a Pre-Raphaelite journal and received many contributions from
Rossetti.
[3] The foreign strain in the English Pre-Raphaelites and in the painters
and poets who descend from them is worth noting. Rossetti was
three-fourths Italian. Millais' parents were Channel Islanders--from
Jersey--and he had two mother tongues, English and French. Burne-Jones
is of Welsh blood, and Alma Tadema of Frisian birth. Among
Neo-Pre-Raphaelite poets, the names of Theophile Marzials and Arthur
O'Shaughnessy speak for themselves.
[4] Let the reader consult the large and rapidly increasing literature on
the English Pre-Raphaelites. I do not profess to be a very competent
guide here, but I have found the following works all in some degree
enlightening. "Autobiographical Notes of William Bell Scott," two vols.,
New York, 1892. "English Contemporary Art." Translated from the French
of R. de la Sizeranne, Westminster, 1898. "D. G. Rossetti as Designer
and Writer." W. M. Rossetti, London, 1889. "The Rossettis." E. L.
Cary, New York, 1900. "Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement."
Esther Wood, New York, 1894. "Pre-Raphaelitism." J. Ruskin, New York,
1860. "The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." Holman Hunt in _Contemporary
Review_, vol. xlix. (three articles). "Encyclopaedia Britannica,"
article "Rossetti." by Theodore Watts. Of course the standard lives and
memoirs by William Rossetti, Hall Caine, William Sharp, and Joseph
Knight, as well as Rossetti's "Family Letters," "Letters to William
Allingham," etc., afford criticisms of the movement from various points
of view. Lists of Rossetti's paintings and drawings are given by several
of these authorities, with photographs or engravings of his most famous
masterpieces.
[5] "Lectures on Architecture and Painting." Delivered at Edinburgh in
1853. Lecture iv., "Pre Raphaelitism."
[6] _Cf._ Milton: "Each stair mysteriously was meant" ("P. L.").
[7] "Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a record and a study," London, 1882, pp.
40-41.
[8] "Pre-Raphaelitism," p. 23, _note_.
[9] "Autobiographical Notes of William Bell Scott," vol. i., p. 281.
[10] "English Contemporary Art," p. 58.
[11] "Lectures on Architecture and Painting," 1853.
[12] See vol. i., p. 44.
[13] "The return of this school was to a mediaevalism different from the
tentative and scrappy mediaevalism of Percy, from the genial but slightly
superficial mediaevalism of Scott, and even from the more exact but
narrow and distinctly conventional mediaevalism of Tennyson. . . .
Moreover, though it may seem whimsical or extravagant to say so, these
poets added to the very charm of mediaeval literature, which they thus
revived, a subtle something which differentiates it from--which, to our
perhaps blind sight, seems to be wanting in--mediaeval literature itself.
It is constantly complained (and some of those who cannot go all the way
with the complainants can see what they mean) that the graceful and
labyrinthine stories, the sweet snatches of song, the quaint drama and
legend of the Middle Ages lack--to us--life; that they are shadowy,
unreal, tapestry on the wall, not alive even as living pageants are. By
the strong touch of modernness which these poets and the best of their
followers introduced into their work, they have given the vivification
required" (Saintsbury, "Literature of the Nineteenth Century," p. 439).
Pre-Raphaelitism "is a direct and legitimate development of the great
romantic revival in England. . . . Even Tennyson, much more Scott and
Coleridge and their generation, had entered only very partially into the
treasures of mediaeval literature, and were hardly at all acquainted with
those of mediaeval art. Conybeare, Kemble, Thorpe, Madden were only in
Tennyson's own time reviving the study of Old and Middle English. Early
French and Early Italian were but just being opened up. Above all, the
Oxford Movement directed attention to mediaeval architecture, literature,
thought, as had never been the case before in England, and as has never
been the case at all in any other country" ("A Short History of English
Literature," by G. Saintsbury, London, 1898, p. 779).
[14] "Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," by T. Hall Caine, London,
1883, p. 41.
[15] "The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti." Edited by W. M.
Rossetti, two vols., London, 1886.
[16] "Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A Record and a Study," p. 305.
[17] He wrote to Allingham in 1855, apropos of the latter's poem "The
Music Master": "I'm not sure that it is not too noble or too resolutely
healthy. . . . I must confess to a need in narrative dramatic
poetry . . . of something rather 'exciting,' and indeed, I believe,
something of the 'romantic' element, to rouse my mind to anything like
the moods produced by personal emotion in my own life. That sentence is
shockingly ill worded, but Keats' narratives would be of the kind I
mean." Theodore Watts ("Encyclopaedia Britannica," article "Rossetti")
says that "the purely romantic temper was with Rossetti a more permanent
and even a more natural temper than with any other nineteenth-century
poet, even including the author of 'Christabel' himself." He thinks that
all the French romanticists together do not equal the romantic feeling in
a single picture of Rossetti's; and he somewhat capriciously defines the
idea at the core of romanticism as that of the evil forces of nature
assailing man through his sense of beauty. Analysis run mad! As to Poe,
Rossetti certainly preferred him to Wordsworth. Hall Caine testifies
that he used to repeat "Ulalume" and "The Raven" from memory; and that
the latter suggested his "Blessed Damozel." "I saw that Poe had done the
utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so
I determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the
yearning of the loved one in heaven" ("Recollections," p. 384).
[18] "Recollections," p. 140.
[19] Caine's "Recollections," p. 266.
[20] Burne-Jones had been attracted by Rossetti's illustration of
Allingham's poem, "The Maids of Elfinmere," and had obtained an
introduction to him at London in 1856. It was by Rossetti's persuasion
that he gave up the church for the career of an artist. Rossetti and
Swinburne some years later (1862) became housemates for a time at
Chelsea; and Rossetti and Morris for a number of years, off and on, at
Kelmscott.
[21] Sharp's "Dante Gabriel Rossetti," p. 190.
[22] See especially Morris' poem "Rapunzel" in "The Defence of Guenevere."
[23] "I can't say," wrote William Morris, "how it was that Rossetti took
no interest in politics; but so it was: of course he was quite Italian in
his general turn of thought; though I think he took less interest in
Italian politics than in English. . . . The truth is, he cared for
nothing but individual and personal matters; chiefly of course in
relation to art and literature."
[24] "The Liberal Movement in English Literature," by W. J. Courthope,
London, 1885, p. 230.
[25] "Keats was a great poet who sometimes nodded. . . . Coleridge was a
muddle-brained metaphysician who, by some strange freak of fortune,
turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was
his wont. . . . I have been through the poems, and find that the only
ones which have any interest for me are: (1) 'Ancient Mariner'; (2)
'Christabel'; (3) 'Kubla Khan'; and (4) the poem called 'Love'"
(Mackail's "Life of Morris," vol. ii., p. 310).
[26] "The Life of William Morris," by W. J. Mackail, London, 1899, vol.
ii., p. 171.
[27] For the Chaucerian manipulation of classical subjects by
Pre-Raphaelite artists see "Edward Burne-Jones," by Malcolm Bell, London,
1899.
[28] "The slough of despond which we call the eighteenth century" ("Hopes
and Fears for Art," p. 211). "The English language, which under the
hands of sycophantic verse-makers had been reduced to a miserable
jargon . . . flowed clear, pure, and simple along with the music of Blake
and Coleridge. Take those names, the earliest in date among ourselves,
as a type of the change that has happened in literature since the time of
George II." (_ibid._, p. 82).
[29] Page 113.
[30] "Sir Edward Burne-Jones told me that Morris would have liked the
faces in his pictures less highly finished, and less charged with the
concentrated meaning or emotion of the painting . . . and he thought that
the dramatic and emotional interest of a picture ought to be diffused
throughout it as equally as possible. Such, too, was his own practice in
the cognate art of poetry; and this is one reason why his poetry affords
so few memorable single lines, and lends itself so little to quotation"
(Mackail's "Life of William Morris," vol. ii., p. 272).
[31] "Hopes and Fears for Art," p. 79.
[32] _Ibid._, p. 83.
[33] See vol. i., pp. 241-43.
[34] _Vide supra_, p. 153.
[35] "A Short History of English Literature," p. 783.
[36] "Recollections of Rossetti," vol. ii., p. 42.
[37] "King Arthur's Tomb."
[38] 0ne of these, "The Haystack in the Floods," has a tragic power
unexcelled by any later work of Morris.
[39] Saintsbury, p. 785.
[40] "King Arthur's Tomb."
[41] "Rapunzel."
[42] "King Arthur's Tomb."
[43] _Ibid_.
[44] "Rapunzel."
[45] "Golden Wings."
[46] See "Sir Galahad," "The Chapel in Lyoness," "A Good Knight in
Prison."
[47] See "Jason," Book xvii., 5-24, and the _Envoi_ to "The Earthly
Paradise."
[48] Some of Morris' sources were William of Malmesbury, "Mandeville's
Travels," the "Gesta Romanorum," and the "Golden Legend." "The Man Born
to be King" was derived from "The Tale of King Constans, the Emperor" in
a volume of French romances ("Nouvelles françaises en prose du xiii.ième
Siècle," Paris, 1856) of which he afterwards (1896) made a prose
translation. The collection included also "The friendship of Amis and
Amile"; "King Florus and the Fair Jehane"; and "The History of Over Sea";
besides "Aucassin and Nicolete," which Morris left out because it had
been already rendered into English by Andrew Lang.
[49] His Vergil's "Aeneid," in the old fourteener of Chapman, was
published in 1876.
[50] _Vide supra_, p. 315.
[51] Mackail, i., p. 168.
[52] Lang's translation.
[53] See vol. i., pp. 190-92.
[54] The "Grettis Saga" (1869); the "Völsunga Saga" (1870); "Three
Northern Love Stories" (1875).
[55] These, in order of publication, were "The House of the Wolfings"
(1889); "The Roots of the Mountains" (1890); "The Story of the Glittering
Plain" (1891); "The Wood Beyond the World" (1894); "The Well at the
World's End" (1896); "The Water of the Wondrous Isles" (1897); and "The
Sundering Flood" (1898).
[56] Morris became so intolerant of French vocables that he detested and
would "fain" have eschewed the very word literature.
[57] This collection is made up of Swinburne's earliest work but is
antedated in point of publication by "The Queen Mother, and Rosamond"
(1861) dedicated to Rossetti; and "Atalanta in Calydon" (1865). "Poems
and Ballads" was inscribed to Burne-Jones.
[58] "Where the lady Mary is,
With her five handmaidens whose names
Are five sweet symphonies,
Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
Margaret and Rosalys."
--"The Blessed Damozel."
[59] _Cf._ Browning's "The Heretic's Tragedy," _supra_, p. 276.
[60] This was the subject of Massinger's "Virgin Martyr."
[61] "Essays and Studies," pp. 85-88.
[62] See "A Study of Ben Jonson"; "John Ford" (in "Essays and Studies");
and the introductions to "Chapman" and "Middleton" in the Mermaid Series.
[63] _Vide supra_, pp. 90, 109, 330, and vol. i., pp. 221-22, 301.
[64] See especially "A Study of Victor Hugo" (1886); the articles on
"L'Homme qui Rit" and "L'Année Terrible" in "Essays and Studies" (1875);
and on Hugo's posthumous writings in "Studies in Prose and Poetry"
(1886); "To Victor Hugo" in "Poems and Ballads" (first series); _Ibid_.
(second series); "Victor Hugo in 1877," _Ibid_.
[65] See "Ave atque Vale" and the memorial verses in English, French, and
Latin on Gautier's death in "Poems and Ballads" (second series).
[66] "A Ballad of François Villon." _Vide supra_, pp. 298-99.
[67] "Essays and Studies," pp. 45-49.