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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:

ROMANTICISM
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Volume 26

THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

1850–70
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS
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1850–70
The Early Work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
William Morris, Burne-Jones, Swinburne,
Simeon Solomon and their Associates

T. EARLE WELBY
 First published in 1929 by Frank Cass & Co., Ltd.
This edition first published in 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
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© 1929 T. Earle Welby

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-138-64537-0 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-315-62815-8 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-19536-3 (Volume 26) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-19539-4 (Volume 26) (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-63844-7 (Volume 26) (ebk)

Publisher’s Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but
points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.
Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome
correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS
1 850-70
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The Early Work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William

Morris, Burne-Jones, Swinburne, Simeon
Solomon and their Associates

BY

T . EA R LE W ELBY

F R A N K CASS A N D C O M PA N Y , LTD.
1966
 Originally Published 1929
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Reprinted 1966 by arrangement with

THE BO D LEY HEAD LTD.
in an unaltered and unabridged edition

This edition published with permission by

FRAN K CASS & CO., LTD.
10 Woburn Walk, London, W.C. 1

Printed in the United States of America

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DEDICATION

TO

THOMAS J. WISE

My dear Wise,— The grandchildren of an eminent

Victorian novelist delighted Swinburne by their confident
assumption that their ancestor’s stories had been written
expressly and exclusively for them. Well, when I find in
the incomparable Ashley Library precisely the first
editions and manuscripts which I need, I feel inclined to
assume that, decades before our acquaintance began,
you collected all those rarities for me! Certainly, the
generosity with which you throw open your collection
to me encourages a belief otherwise not very obviously
reasonable. I can make you no adequate return for hours
in the most interesting and hospitable room in London,
for the excitement of having in my hands the treasures
you have brought together in your long devotion to the
writers whom I also peculiarly cherish. But accept this
book, and believe me
Ever yours
T . E arle W e l b y
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L IST OF ILLU STRATION S

The Two Sleepers and the One that Watcheth. s i m e o n

So l o m o n (From a photograph by Frederick Hollyer) Frontispiece

Title-page of The Germ, No. i Page 19

Etching for The Germ, holm an h unt „ 22
Etching for The Germ. w. h . deverell „ 26
Etching for The Germ, ja m es c o l l in s o n „ 28
Etching for The Germ, holm an h unt „ 30
Title-page of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, No. 1 „ 35
Cartoon by r o s s e t t i (including portraits of Swinburne and
Christina Rossetti) „ 38
Facsimile Letter from s im e o n s o l o m o n to Swinburne Pages 53-6
Angeli Laudantes. Morris Tapestry from design by b u r n e -
j o n e s (From the Victoria and Albert Museum, and by

courtesy of Messrs Morris) Page 58

Title-page of Undergraduate Papers „ 65
Cleopatra. Fr e d e r ic k s a n d y s (From the Comhill Magazine,
by courtesy of Messrs John Murray) „ 74
St Agnes’ Eve. m il l a is „ 78
The Lady of Shalott. h olm an h u nt „ 92
Facsimile MS. ‘ The End of It,’ by d . g . r o s s e t t i Pages 104-5
ix
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Facsimile MS. of unpublished poem by SWINBURNE Page 115

Facsimile MS. ‘ An Apple-gathering,’ by Ch r i s t i n a
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r o ssetti Pages 122-3

Facsimile MS. ‘ The Haystack in the Floods,’ by w il l ia m

m o r r is Page 129
The Palace of Art. d . g . ro ssetti „ 132
Facsimile letter (last page) from b u r n e - j o n e s „ 137
Title-page of Goblin Market and other poems, b y Ch r i s t i n a
r o s s e t t i , designed by d . g . r o s s e t t i „ 149

# *
*

The Author and the Publishers wish to

acknowledge with gratitude their obligations
to all who have facilitated the use of the
pictures and manuscripts illustrated in this
volume, and in particular to Mr T . J.
Wise, the authorities of the Victoria and
Albert Museum, Messrs Morris and
Mr Frederick Hollyer

x
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THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

B
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An account of the Romantic Movement in English poetry is

only too apt to be arbitrary in choice of a starting-point. Consider
the Movement as a whole, and who shall say exactly where it begins ?
With Chatterton, if you like, with Blake, with the publication of
the Lyrical Ballads. But there had been dim beginnings much earlier,
a kind of ‘ return to nature ’ with Dyer so far back as 1726, when
he issued ‘ Grongar Hill,’ a return with Thomson not only to nature,
sometimes so closely observed as in the description of the autumnal
sun that ‘ sheds, weak and blunt, his wide-refracted ray,’ but to so
purely Romantic a poet as Spenser. However it may have seemed to
contemporaries and may still seem to conventional historians of
literature, the eighteenth-century ideal was menaced almost before
it was fully established. On the other hand, by a happy paradox
which should not have escaped the notice of critics, the two perfect
lyrics of the eighteenth century, the two pieces in which the finest
possibilities allowed by those limiting conditions are realized, were
written by Romantic poets, by Blake in ‘ To the Muses,’ by Coleridge
in ‘ Youth and Age.’
But if it would be difficult to know quite where to begin a critical
record of the Romantic Movement as a whole, there is no difficulty
in deciding where to begin this book on The Victorian Romantics.
Chronologically, Tennyson and Browning come well within the
period. Both outlived Rossetti, and nearly all the finest work of
Morris and Swinburne was done well before the last volumes of
the two elder poets appeared. During the greater part of the
Queen’s reign Tennyson was officially and popularly regarded
3
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

as sovereign of song, and Browning was the idol of, at any rate, a
considerable circle of Victorian intellectuals. Both were eminently
Romantic in all their better work, though with Browning there
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was that frequent tendency towards the overbalanced Romanticism

which yields us the grotesque. But neither comes into this
argument. For in their Romanticism they date back. Extremely
Victorian as they, and especially Tennyson, may be in other respects,
as Romantics they are pre-Victorian, Tennyson being a poet to
whom Keats is a recent discovery, Browning one who has lately
discovered Shelley. The Romantic work truly characteristic of the
new era comes from men at least twenty years younger, from Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Swinburne, and from a writer
whose influence was felt in poetry a little earlier, Christina Rossetti.
Before the date with which I begin, say 1850, there has not in
strictness been any movement. The Lake School, if it has to accom­
modate Southey, is a fiction; and though for a time, unhappily short,
Wordsworth and Coleridge react on each other, and though Shelley
mourns Keats, and though Keats for a year or two apes Leigh Hunt,
these men are very much going their own ways. Tennyson and
Browning work in isolation. But after 1850 there is something more
than a general tendency. Not that we get with the Pre-Raphaelites,
or with the little urbane group of the late ’seventies, or with the
little decadent group of the ’nineties, the equivalent of religious or
political movements. We shall never find that in the history of litera­
ture or art, where the aim is always, in however cordial an agree­
ment on general principles, the self-expression of the individual,
the conveying of a personal sense of the world, not the attainment
of an exterior goal which exists in precisely the same form for each
one of those striving towards it. But for a good many years at any
rate the associates of Rossetti hold together, and those later and
smaller groups also cohere.
Movements are rather un-English, and this Victorian movement,
4
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

begun under an Italianate man of genius, proceeds with many exotic

stimulants. In Tennyson, Europe barely exists; Browning wanders
in imagination over much of it, but only for settings and situations;
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with Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne, and Swinburne especially,

the insular mind is exposed eagerly to every alien prompting. And
presently what Tennyson, in an absurd phrase, called poisonous
honey stolen from France becomes the staple food of some of the
men of the ’nineties.
Another distinction between this Victorian Romanticism and
that represented, in their several ways, by Tennyson and Browning:
from 1850 onwards, as never before, poetry is associated with, often
inspired by, the graphic arts. Rossetti is not more evidently the
dominant figure in the first two decades than Aubrey Beardsley in
the last, and in the interval we are frequently sent from the page of
poetry to the decorative art of William Morris, the paintings of
Burne-Jones, the corrupt delicacies of Simeon Solomon, the litho­
graphs and etchings of Whistler, the fans designed by Charles
Conder.
Again, it is only after 1850, and in these new developments, that
we find, a phenomenon much rarer with us than in France, at every
stage an accredited exponent of the innovations. Before 1850 there
is only Ruskin, sympathetic towards Pre-Raphaelitism, but detached
from Tennyson and Browning; a little later there is Matthew Arnold,
sapping Philistinism, but of no particular service to those poets.
But after the first successes of Rossetti’s circle they have Walter
Pater, and in the ’eighties there is the witty, impudent, often sug­
gestive popularizer Oscar Wilde, and in the ’nineties the authentic
criticism of Mr Arthur Symons.
Differentiated in all these ways from the broader and vaguer
Romanticism of the preceding half-century, Victorian Romanticism
differs in this also, that it came much more rapidly to its climax,
and not only because a long line of poets had prepared conditions
5
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

favourable to its triumph. Certain of the historians of literature tend

to forget that they have to take account not only of what is called
genius but of character. If, as has been seen, the progress of Roman­
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ticism was so long delayed in the eighteenth century, it was not

merely because the powerful influence of Pope was hostile to it.
Not one of the poets in whom we see the first hints of a new feeling
for nature, a new care for atmosphere or music, had the qualities
which make the effective revolutionary. Gray was fastidious, frugal
in production, very anxious not to be considered a working author;
Thomson was mild and indolent; Collins, a withdrawn nature,
gathered up his work to keep it from the public, and passed soon
into the shadow of madness. They were all men of subdued vitality,
little disposed to insist publicly on the value of what was novel in
their somewhat tentative work. But, when we come to the Victorian
Romantics, we find them led by a man who was born to command.
Before insomnia and chloral broke him down, Rossetti had,
as hardly anyone else in our literature has had, that casual, com­
pelling authority, that easy, dominating way with men which
marks a supreme leader. And several of his most distinguished
associates were men eminently qualified to challenge accepted ideas.
The tireless and many-sided effort of William Morris to renew the
golden age was accompanied by the more spasmodic assaults which
the high-strung and mischief-loving genius of Swinburne made on
the established order— moral, political and aesthetic; and in the
controversies which raged over ‘ The Fleshly School of Poetry ’ it
was made very evident that the group was capable of defending
itself and ready to carry the war into the country of its opponents.
It had, of course, the usual apathy to cope with, and beyond that
some stubborn prejudice against the somewhat un-English quality
of emotion in much of its work. On the whole, however, its chief
difficulty, in poetry, was the influence of Tennyson. Odd as it may
sound, it would have been easier for the new poetry, which derived
6
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

in part from Tennyson’s own sources, and was, in certain instances,

affected by his own earlier work, to have made way if Tennyson
had been altogether in the enemy’s camp. Overshadowing all con­
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temporaries as markedly as Pope had done in the preceding century,

Tennyson offered to new developments a passive resistance the
harder to overcome because he frequently and discreetly adjusted
himself to change. He did not present an antithesis to the new poetry:
he seemed rather to show exactly how far a consummate artist in
poetry who was also an Englishman and a man with a just sense of
moral obligations should go along the new paths. It is true that in
some portions of his work, then the least generally esteemed, he
had gone further than it beseemed an idol of the mid-Victorian
middle class to travel, and had revealed, for the very few who could
see it, the animosities and fears and acrid discontents which were
his finest inspirations. But that Tennyson, the author of Maud
among lesser things, was by no means the Laureate revered by the
pundits and the populace. The officially and popularly applauded
Tennyson was more than a great poet; he was the Poet, as Victoria
was the Queen. He seemed as permanent as she, rather later, came
to seem. He had survived, and was to survive, so many things. There
had been all that excitement, short-lived but really very consider­
able, over the Spasmodics. Well, if you cared for that sort of thing,
there was his Maud. But the wiser minds, as they were deemed,
rather passed by Maud to dwell on the general mass of his idyllic,
elegiac, descriptive and meditative poetry. The contemplation of it
was soothing. It left the most of those who read it with a feeling
that this was final, that there could be nothing of high importance
beyond it. Theoretically, they might be liberal enough to allow all
sorts of possibilities; but in practice they were unwilling to believe
that anything going beyond Tennyson was other than specialized
and more or less eccentric, probably unwholesome, art.
And this Tennysonian influence, for several decades so paralysing
7
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

to poetry, was most dangerous to the ways of dealing with the past
which Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne preferred. For Tennyson
had subtly modernized the great body of wild and ancient legends
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out of which he made what Swinburne wickedly called the Morte

d’Albert. Consciously or unconsciously, he had persistently ignored
the difference between medieval and Victorian sentiment, and had
presented the characters of a part chivalrous, part barbaric past as
refined and conscientious members of modern English society.
When Morris produced, with incomparably more truth and vivid­
ness, though with a then uncertain technique, the miraculous pic­
tures of medieval life in the Defence of Guenevere volume, the effect
for most readers, though it was years before many found the book,
could only be one of wilful perversity. When, later on, Swinburne
in Chastelard revived with exquisite fidelity the fantastic and
suicidal ardour of a mode of love well understood by choice spirits
of the Renaissance, he could only be regarded as gratuitously dabb­
ling in insane sensuality.
In regard to painting, Rossetti’s circle met with no such difficulty.
The work of the painters then most in fashion was evidently at most
points antithetical to theirs, and the fight, arduous and prolonged
as it was, was simple. Moreover, the painters in the circle included
a man so accommodating as Millais, whereas not one of the poets
ever made any concession to average British expectations.

It is not my purpose here to write a history of Victorian Roman­

ticism from its emergence about 1850 to its evaporation in the
little movement of the ’nineties. There are histories enough of Pre-
Raphaelitism, and at the other extreme the period of Aubrey
Beardsley has been quite fully enough treated. What I have proposed
to myself is to study Victorian Romanticism in the origins of its
several phases, and especially in those periodicals the Germ, the
Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, Undergraduate Papers, in which
8
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

challenges were thrown out to the orthodox. It is in the early work

of successive generations of writers and painters or draughtsmen,
in their coterie publications, and in certain polemical writings that,
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for the most part, I intend to study the Victorian Romantics. And
since some of the documents, vaguely cited by everyone, are not
quite to everyone’s hand, some items indeed being very rare, I
propose to quote from them freely.
What should result is not a chronicle covering the whole career
of all these men of genius and talent, but a series of critical minia­
tures exhibiting them at or soon after the moment of entry into
the movement. However necessary my allusions to the subsequent
work of these men, my main concern is with their initial efforts,
with them in youth, in the first rapture of innovation. I seek to
present them not with the prestige of their whole achievement, but
as they originally appeared to the public of their day.
My method is to take them as individuals, as they come naturally
to mind. To aim at an effect of ordered critical narrative would be
to secure approval in certain quarters at the cost of injustice to
these poets and painters. The movement in which they took part
was not something exterior and irresistible ; it was made by them,
so far as each for a longer or shorter time, and of his own volition,
entered into it. They are not mere illustrations of an artistic ten­
dency emanating from a source external to them: they are artists
each with his birthright, each with a will of his own, electing to
join the movement each at its own hour. Chronology, that logic
which is so much stricter than life or art, must not be suffered
to give a false orderliness to this account of them. They matter
ultimately as individuals, and must not be reduced to being mere
members of a school, or so manipulated as to become a procession
leading to one and the same precisely definable objective.

9
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II

K eats died in 1821, Shelley in 1822; and though Coleridge lived

on to 1834 and Wordsworth to 1850, the first phase of the Romantic
movement in England ended with the close of the second decade of
the century. There followed a period during which Tennyson and
Browning were developing in secret, but in which the only new
poetic figures discernible by contemporaries were those of George
Darley and Thomas Lovell Beddoes.
Darley, to borrow the famous phrase of Dekker’s eulogist, ‘ had
poetry enough for anything.’ ‘Nepenthe’ is rich to excess in imagina­
tion, and of romantic strangeness. But, a fine and unsparing critic
of himself as well as other men, Darley has explained his failure
better than anyone else can, summing up his genius as ‘ occasional,
intermittent, collapsive.’ Lacking direction, ‘Nepenthe’ remains an
extraordinary when it might have been a great poem. His plays,
uninviting to the general reader, faintly disappointing as they must
be even to a sympathetic and collaborating mind, are of finer
quality than is generally allowed, and with those of Robert Landor
seem to me the most unfairly neglected dramatic work of their
period. But, so often on the verge of achievement, Darley achieves
only in the lyric which deceived Palgrave, in the touching lines to
Helene, in the beautifully metred lines which were Meredith’s model
for ‘ Love in the Valley.’ To read him is to be reminded, if one ever
has seen that sight, of fireflies in their uncertain morrice through a
tropical grove: innumerable little lights glimmer out, but nowhere
is there illumination enough for more than a momentary glimpse of
leaf and flower.
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

Beddoes, with a yet rarer genius, is still more self-defeated,

squandering his powers on a morbid, fundamentally undramatic
drama on the Elizabethan model. Outside the lyrics every one knows,
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he can rise to wonderful passages. But, on the whole, he remains a

curiosity, a carver of death’s-heads which would have more value
for us if they were the final sardonic comment in a comprehensive
criticism of life instead of being the initial and terminal ornaments
of every page. He is an architect of the house of life who can plan
only the mortuary and the gargoyles.
Two other poets, born considerably later, and indeed the one
twenty and the other fifteen years younger than Tennyson, came
into prominence, burst into it violently, before Tennyson was
universally acclaimed or Browning at all widely honoured. There is
this to be said for the Spasmodics, that rashly as they strained after
the sublime and insecure as they were, grandeur was not unnatural
to them. Alexander Smith has worn ill, and is now perhaps remem­
bered by little but ‘ Barbara,’ with its echoing music, and the poem
on Glasgow, which accumulates natural detail with some of the
energy and success of Christopher Smart. Sydney Dobell’s finest
poem, ‘Keith of Ravelston,’ which should, however, be read in its
context and not as ordinarily presented in anthologies, is a familiar
possession, often and not unjustly praised as coming nearer than
anything else in our poetry to ‘ La Belle Dame Sans Merci.’ What to
my mind has long seemed his next most remarkable success, ‘Isabel,’
has been passed over alike by anthologists and, so far as I can re­
member, critics and literary historians. A lament for one who can
be thought upon only in the purity and peace of dawn, it has a
singular delicacy of matutinal atmosphere, and is at once intimate
and aloof. On a much lower level, with that realism which issued
also in his own sonnets, most strikingly in the unfair assault on us
of the lines in which the woman at home makes music ‘ for him who
cannot hear the raven croaking at his carrion ear,’ Dobell has another
ii
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

success in ‘ Tommy’s Dead.’ It is a poem of effect, competing with

recitation pieces, but it does what none of its competitors has done,
it renders exactly the garrulity of stricken old age.
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There was upon Dobell, as upon so many other poets of his day,
the curse of having no form in the larger sense; ‘ Balder,’ with so
much really beautiful incidental poetry, is a shapeless and drifting
composition. They have their occasional successes, these poets, but
between the death of Shelley and the full emergence of Tennyson
and Browning there is hardly anywhere a volume of definitely
achieved poetry. It looks as if the Romantic Movement were about
to end in curious or violent but always uncertain efforts to right
or left of the main course.
If anywhere there is a considerable mass of verse in which some­
thing is done to the measure of its author’s intention, it is in a book
not taken seriously then or now, but one which any sensitive and
unprejudiced mind must, I venture to think, regard with real
respect. Because the Ingoldsby Legends are full of laughter, because
their metrical art is junambulesque and their rhymes the most in­
geniously contrived that we have, many readers have not perceived
how romantic, at moments how sinister, is this strange, often jolly,
sometimes terrified, game played with mystery and horrors. Super­
ficially, Barham goes back to monkish things and old legends to
mock at them, and no doubt there is in him something of a crude,
modern and Protestant desire to get a laugh out of monasticism and
superstition. But beneath that, and likely enough not under his
control, there is an instinct for the macabre rarer than that of
Beddoes, and a really poetic imagination breaks out now and then,
terrifyingly, though the hearty romping is immediately resumed for
our reassurance and his own. Hidden away in this rollicking verse
there is real feeling for at least certain aspects of that past to which
nearly all the Romantics have yearned, and at the same time
there is an appreciation, furtive and quickly laughed off, of some
12
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

things that will hardly be prized again till we are in the decadence.
There are moments in the reading of the Ingoldsby Legends, if one
is reading with a mind free from prepossessions, when one seems
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to be watching, in a monk’s refectory transformed into a private

theatre, the queer gambols of a single actor, very conscious of his
solitariness, a priest-Pierrot. He walks the tight-rope infallibly, goes
through his tricks at a great rate, and rattles along with his ingenious
and preposterous patter, but there are dreadful things waiting to
burst in from the wings, and he knows it. If he should stop romping
and laughing!
During the interval between the first and the second phase of
Romanticism in England, say, roughly, between a little after 1820
and a little after 1840, there had begun in France a feverish and
magnificent revival of Romance. Its interest for us here lies in the
fact that it anticipated that close association between the arts which
was to distinguish Victorian from Georgian and Regency Roman­
ticism. To some extent the way had been prepared for it by Rous­
seau; by Mme de Stael’s discovery of Germany, also; but the
strongest impulse came from two English writers, from Scott and
from Byron, the one made amply available to French readers from
1816, the other from 1819. The supreme development of Romantic
painting in France sprang from a purely pictorial source, also English;
from Constable, three of whose pictures, including ‘The Hay Wain,’
were shown in the momentous Salon of 1824. But Romanticism had
earlier issue in French painting in the work of figure painters who
took their subjects or their sentiments directly or indirectly from
Scott and Byron, and the influence of those two English writers,
or perhaps rather the atmosphere created by certain of their French
admirers, affected all the arts. If Victor Hugo appeared as part
author of Amy Robsart, Delacroix depicted the ‘ Barque of Don
Juan ’ and ‘ Marino Faliero,’ and Berlioz began with a Waverley
Overture to proceed with work on a Byronic theme.
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

In England, however, there could be no similar movement.

Scott and Byron did not, and could not, mean so much to the choicer
spirits of the younger generation in England. From Scott they could
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get little but the accessories of Romance, and the reaction against
the histrionic Romanticism of Byron had already begun. As regards
poetry, the younger men in England were feeling towards a just
attitude to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats. The work of
Wordsworth, of Coleridge, notoriously needed sifting, a task not
completed until it was done by Matthew Arnold in the one instance
and Swinburne in the other. Shelley, of whose volumes only one,
The Cenci, had passed into a second edition in his own life-time,
was not to be read fully till his widow finished her editorial labours
in 1839. Keats had to wait till Monckton Milnes put forth the first
collected edition.1 This last, published in the vitally important year
1848, by an agreeable and suggestive coincidence was blind-blocked
with the same design that appears on the fourth edition of Tenny­
son’s Poems, 1846. In 1848 Rossetti’s enthusiasm over Holman
Hunt’s work arose, as Hunt has recorded, partly from their com­
mon interest in Keats, a poet, however, very much more to Rossetti’s
purpose than Hunt’s: they felt themselves to be exceptional in
going to him for pictorial suggestions.

1 There had, however, previously been published, in Smith’s Standard Library,

‘ The Poetical Works of John Keats,’ 1840; and still earlier, Galignani’s ‘ Poetical
Works of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats,’ Paris, 1829. Both, of course, want the
matter which gave peculiar importance to the edition of 1848.
14
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I ll

I t was not that English painting was unliterary. With Leslie,

a capable painter, as one recognizes when dislike of his sardine-tin
surfaces has been set aside, it was only too literary. But in the anec­
dotal kind of painting there had been since Wilkie very little
painter’s notice of character and humour. Leslie and his rivals went
to Shakespeare only as actors of the period rendered him, and for the
rest went to Goldsmith or Sterne, not to the poets. There was, or
until lately had been, imagination enough in English painting of
other kinds, in the great masters of landscape. In 1848 Constable
had been dead for thirteen years, but De Wint had still a year,
Turner three years, and David Cox eleven years of life. Outside
landscape there was imagination at work, never more nobly than in
Cotman’s ‘ The Centaur,’ a drawing of surely the very highest ex­
cellence . And there was even an approach to poetry, as represented by a
particular poet, in the work ofEdward Calvert (1799-1883), who con­
tinued the slighter part of William Blake’s pastoral work, and some­
times with that happy and personal sense of design that delights us in
‘ The Cyder Press.’ But, broadly, painting was aloof from poetry.
The painter who had been most in the company and in the
thoughts of poets was that stupendous self-deceiver, Benjamin
Haydon. The writer of verse who was most zealous about painting
was no poet, but the witty, malicious and generous Samuel Rogers.
Landor had long ago brought a lofty yet homely sculptor’s realism
into poetry, in ‘Gebir’ especially, and Keats had done painter’s work
in poetry; but, on the whole, even had the artists been well aware
of the poets, there could have been little imaginative commerce.
15
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

Painting was in that condition in which there is a paralysing

general agreement as to the extent to which the ordinary phenomena
are to be observed and stressed. The sudden challenge from the
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Pre-Raphaelites was so effective precisely because it was directed

against this paralysing and unpoetic agreement. There were a great
many other things in Pre-Raphaelitism besides that which inspired
and roughly justified its title. And if its method, in 1848-1852, is to
be regarded as the essential thing, Holman Hunt himself must be
deposed in favour of a senior who was a total outsider and had long
been absent from England: J. F. Lewis (1805-1876). It is not only
that Lewis anticipates the passion for detail; he surpasses every Pre-
Raphaelite in getting out of the method all that it can yield.
But the method, which was permanently congenial only to
Holman Hunt out of all the Pre-Raphaelites, was what at the outset
made the challenge effective. We are, however, thoroughly justified
in allowing Holman Hunt and Millais to drop early out of our argu­
ment here, and in insisting on the leadership of Rossetti, because in
the two essential things, in poetry and in independence of painter’s
convention, Rossetti was so very much richer.
There are revolutions which can be carried through only by an
alien, who has, besides willingness to break the rules he knows, a
lucky ignorance of the customs of the country. Now, Rossetti was
not only almost entirely a foreigner in blood: he was an intruder
into painting from poetry. He was Pre-Raphaelite, in Holman Hunt’s
sense of the term, so far that he was willing, within the limits of his
rather rapidly exhausted patience, to be particular and minute, but
his motive was quite other than Hunt’s or than Ruskin’s. For the
subject as presented to him by nature he had no respect. He would
isolate that in it which appealed to his poetic imagination and he
would then surround it with accessories of his own, imported no
matter whence, and charged with a significance that the natural,
accidental accessories had not possessed. Having no feeling what­
16
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

ever for tone, and a very lively hatred of what he called ‘ slosh,’ he
instinctively and deliberately made prominent what painters had
long made subsidiary, the pattern. And in pattern he liked the
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decisive, the recurrent. A great many of his paintings, and more of

his drawings, are like sonnets: spaced out in octave and sextet, with
visible rhymes at the appointed places. Had he been all that we
mean when we say the word painter, we should have had from him
greater pictures and drawings, but no such challenge to artistic
conventions as was flung out by him.
But there would have been no revolution if Rossetti, Hunt and
Millais had not come together while they were still too young to
know whither they were, each of them, travelling.
Rossetti, working under Ford Madox Brown and Hunt, certainly
had something from both, but he repaid it, to Hunt’s advantage
rather than Brown’s. Look at that most admirable design by Hunt,
* The Lady of Shalott,’ in the Tennyson these and other artists illus­
trated. It is almost wholly Rossetti. But in the genius of Brown, and
the most distinctive quality in it, there was something of an honest
surliness, a wholesome glowering appreciation of what is knotty,
harsh and grotesque in the human comedy. So far as Rossetti and
the Pre-Raphaelites reacted on Brown, they drew him, luckily not
very far, towards an art in which that had little scope. To put it
crudely, with reference to, I suppose, the most famous of Brown’s
pictures, they made some suggestions towards the adequate, un­
inspiring Christ Who washes Peter’s feet, but the intent, rather
irritable, thoroughly characterized Peter was wholly Brown’s.
All that, however, was in the future. In 1848 Rossetti, Holman
Hunt, Millais, Woolner were very young men, the oldest twenty-
three, the youngest nineteen, and they came together at the Royal
Academy Schools in a discontent with contemporary painting
strong enough to hide from them the unlikelihood of permanent
agreement. Hunt and Rossetti were profoundly religious, the one
17 C
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

in a very English and Protestant and direct way, the other in a very
foreign, sensuous adoration before a veiled beauty. Millais, wonder­
fully precocious in technique, had no deep thing in him, but was
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ready then to take Huntsian or Rossettian subjects at the value at

which they were proffered, as later on he was willing to take the
average Academy subject at the value attached to it by the public.
He had no personal scale of values, and neither Hunt’s moral
respect for the fact nor Rossetti’s insolence towards the setting in
which it occurred.
All were in some degree literary. Rossetti was already an achieving
poet; Woolner was writing, in a sculptor’s leisure, ‘ My Beautiful
Lady,’ and in 1849 was to project an Arthurian poem, which should
occupy him for ‘ some fifteen years ’ ; Hunt was reading Keats;
Millais was trying to write verse; and in the background was Ford
Madox Brown, the painter of ‘ Chaucer,’ while Coventry Patmore
impinged on the circle. Keats, Tennyson, Browning were constantly
under discussion, and Rossetti was ‘ reciting lots of Patmore,
Browning, Mrs Browning.’ It was inevitable that the group should
presently seek an outlet in literature.
Meanwhile it had made its protest in painting. In 1849 it had
exhibited Hunt’s ‘ Rienzi ’ and Millais’ ‘ Lorenzo and Isabella ’ ;
in 1850, the year in which it produced the Germ,, it was represented
by the ‘ Carpenter’s Shop ’ of Millais, sold the day before sending
in for £350, and his ‘ Ferdinand and Ariel,’ and Hunt’s ‘ Converted
British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Druids,’
sold for £150. These prompt sales, the mildness of criticism in 1849,
and the declaration of Samuel Carter Hall, Editor of the Art Journal,
on seeing the first number of the Germ, that the Pre-Raphaelites
were ‘ the future great artists of the age and country,’ go some way
towards correcting the impression that the Pre-Raphaelites were
instantly and uncompromisingly assailed where they were not
ignored. To be sure, there was a period of bitter persecution, but
18
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

by 1851 they had their champion in Ruskin, and by 1853, the year
of Millais’s triumph, they had in some sort prevailed over their
enemies. On Rossetti alone was the persecution permanent in effect.
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The attacks on the ‘ Ecce Ancilla Domini,’ the ‘ blessed white eye­
sore ’ of his own later condemnation, turned him from directly
religious subjects, caused him also to withdraw from public ex­
hibition of his work.
That the Germ itself did very much for the Pre-Raphaelites is
not to be believed. The challenge thrown out by the group, and
after a while taken up by the spokesmen of the established order,
was in graphic art, and it cannot be pretended that the four speci­
mens of their art, in a medium the least congenial to them, were as
provocative as the paintings they executed in the same year. The
importance of the Germ lies mainly in the revelation of Dante
Gabriel and Christina Rossetti as poets, and poets already arrived
at something like maturity. To a certaint extent also, though this
has not always been observed, the prose in the Germ has importance
as foreshadowing developments then nearly twenty years in the
future. I do not speak of the reviews contributed by William Michael
Rossetti. They have some merit as well as some historical interest;
and here it may be added that the industry of William Michael as
editor of Moxon’s Poets and as, from 1850, art critic of the Spectator,
was quietly useful to the movement. He had perhaps no very sure
instinct for the vraie verite, he suffered an element of commonplace
to invade his writing, he went too far in emendation of the text of
Shelley, he became in old age rather tiresomely garrulous in print
about his family, but, for all that, he had genuine and independent
appreciation of many things in poetry and art not readily appreciable
in 1850, and his educative work was carried on with a mixture of
firmness and conciliatoriness that made it really helpful. But, as I
have said, it is not of his prose I am thinking: rather, of his brother’s.
For in certain sentences in the story Dante Gabriel printed in the
21
 TH E VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

Germ we have the earliest of the hints, the later coming from Swin­
burne’s long subsequent essay on drawings by Old Masters at
Florence, on which Walter Pater fashioned his style. Who, having
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quoted to him such a sentence as ‘ He would feel faint in sunsets

and at the sight of stately persons,’ but would hesitate over its
authorship ?
If in the foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood D. G.
Rossetti had taken a part less important than those of Hunt and
Millais, he was foremost in initiating the Germ. In July, 1849, he
and his brother and Woolner were trying to arrange with or
through William North, author of Anti-Coningsby, for ‘ a monthly
sixpenny magazine for which four or five of us would write and one
make an etching, each subscribing a guinea and thus becoming a
proprietor.’ Out of discussion of this project came the Germ, the
title being chosen out of some sixty suggested, of which the Seed
had been for a time most favoured. Publishers were found in Messrs
Aylott and Jones; printers in Messrs Tupper and Sons; and on, or
immediately after, New Year’s Day, 1850, there were issued the
700 copies of the first number of The Germ:)Thoughts towards
NatureIIn Poetry, Literature, and Art. Some 400 copies were sold,
though not more than 200 to the general public. The net cost of
producing this number had been only £18 2s 6d, but after taking
sales revenue into account the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had to
contribute thirty-five shillings each to meet the deficit, and their
distress was piteous. Of the second number they caused only 500 to
be printed; the sales were worse; and the magazine was about to come
to an end when the printers, as represented by George Tupper, under­
took to bear the risk of two more issues, which appeared with the
altered title, Art and Poetry, being Thoughts towards Nature, conducted
principally by Artists, Messrs Dickinson becoming joint publishers.
With the close of the year publication ceased; after 1852 D. G.
Rossetti and Millais ceased to be intimate; and next year Millais
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HOLMAN HUNT
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

was an A.R.A., and Hunt, with a religious motive certainly, but

perhaps influenced also by thought of what Lewis had discovered
there, was looking to the East. Collinson had resigned earlier on
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religious grounds; Woolner had left for Australia. ‘ So now the

whole Round Table is dissolved,’ Dante Gabriel had written to
Christina on the election of Millais to the Royal Academy; and she
celebrated its dissolution in not too mournful an epicede:

The P.R.B. is in its decadence:

For Woolner in Australia cooks his chops:
And Hunt is yearning for the land of Cheops;
D. G. Rossetti shuns the vulgar optic;
While William M. Rossetti merely lops
His B’s in English disesteemed as Coptic.
Calm Stephens in the twilight smokes his pipe,
But long the opening of his public day;
And he at last the champion great Millais,
Attaining Academic opulence,
Winds up his signature with A.R.A.
So rivers merge in the perpetual sea;
So luscious fruit must fall when over-ripe!
And so the consummated P.R.B.

Public use of the title P.R.B. had in fact been abandoned before
this, as needlessly irritant; and when in December, 1849, Rossetti,
Holman Hunt and Stephens had looked over the house in Cheyne
Walk in which Rossetti was eventually to live from 1862, they had
already been so nervous about the title as to think only half jestingly
of inscribing it on the door where it might be explained away as:
Please Ring the Bell.
The Germ, despite the four etchings, the expository articles by
G. F. Stephens and Ford Madox Brown, and the declaration on the
back of its first number that it would in art ‘ encourage and enforce
an entire adherence to the simplicity of nature,’ was much more
23
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

successful in presenting the new poetry than in illustrating and

defending the new art.
To review its contents: the first number had for frontispiece an
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etching in two compartments by Holman Hunt, not unworthy of

him in conception, but vitiated by his incapacity to give his charac­
teristic detail in that medium. Opposite to it was the beginning of
Woolner’s poem, ‘ My Beautiful Lady,’ followed by ‘ Of My Lady
in Death,’ pieces eventually shaped into his volume of 1863.These
compositions have numerous weaknesses, sometimes those common
in amateur verse, occasionally resultant from a Leigh Huntsian
misuse of words, as in ‘ my head sank on her bosom’s heave ’ ; and,
as Coventry Patmore had acutely noted when he heard them in
1849, ‘ each stanza stands too much alone, and has its own ideas too
much to itself.’ But, for all that, they possess a certain sculptural
quality then unusual enough to excite comment. After them came a
sonnet by Ford Madox Brown, of no account as poetry, yet with its
small contribution to the painter’s way of looking at the world in the
phrase ‘ line-blending twilight.’
Theory came in with a rather ingenious essay by J. L. Tupper
on ‘ The Subject in Art,’ insisting that subjects in painting affect
the beholder precisely as if he came on them in nature, and pleading
for more attention to contemporary subjects, but really amusing
only in the argument that whereas a pheasant at the poulterer’s is a
bird, on a canvas it is food.
But it was the poetry that made the first number of the Germ a
great event, and its poetry, in the full sense, begins with Coventry
Patmore’s stanzas, in their own kind unsurpassed in his later work,
‘ The Seasons ’ :
The crocus, in the shrewd March morn,
Thrusts up his saffron spear;
And April dots the sombre thorn
With gems, and loveliest cheer.
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

Then sleep the seasons, full of might;

While slowly swells the pod,
And rounds the peach, and in the night
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The mushroom bursts the sod.

The winter comes: the frozen rut

Is bound with silver bars;
The white drift heaps against the hut;
And night is pierced with stars.

On the reverse of the page holding that is Christina Rossetti’s

‘ Dream Land,’ not quite the earliest published of her lyrics, since
two short pieces by her had appeared in the Athenceum in 1848, but
the first to give her characteristic note:

Rest, rest, for evermore

Upon a mossy shore,
Rest, rest, that shall endure
Till time shall cease;
Sleep that no pain shall wake,
Night that no mom shall break,
Till joy shall overtake
Her perfect peace.

There we are almost within sight of the Swinburne of ‘ The Garden

of Proserpine.’
Facing this poem of Christina’s is Dante Gabriel’s very early and
not wholly personal ‘ My Sister’s Sleep,’ announced by the title in
the Germ as No. 1 of ‘ Songs of One Household,’ but certainly alone
in his work. The Germ had it by accident; or, to speak more piously,
the most high Muses contrived to keep the editress of the Belle
Assemblee, who had admired it enthusiastically, from using it in her
unworthy pages. Dante Gabriel came to dislike it, and when in 1869
he was collecting his verse for the famous volume of the next year
he included it only at the urging of Swinburne and other advisers,
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

and only after deleting the weak seventh, eighth, twelfth and thir­
teenth stanzas. As indicative of the poor matter then excised, I
quote the two stanzas which, in the Germ, followed the sixth of the
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final text:
Silence was speaking at my side
With an exceedingly clear voice:
I knew the calm as of a choice
Made in God for me, to abide.

I said, ‘ Full knowledge does not grieve:

This which upon my spirit dwells
Perhaps would have been sorrow else:
But I am glad ’tis Christmas Eve/

Dante Gabriel’s youth when he composed it, the influence of the

earlier Coventry Patmore, possibly too some hint from Hood, may
explain the simplicity and domestic sentiment of some lines of the
poem, but it is so far in accord with the ideals of the Pre-Raphaelites
that it educes spiritual significance out of its well-observed details,
and already there is a rare subtlety in rendering certain sensations,
with something of that grave expectancy which was to cause Walter
Pater to regard Rossetti as a poet for whom every moment was a
crisis.
Dante Gabriel’s contributions in verse, like his sister’s, were
pieces written before the Germ had been even dimly projected;
his solitary contribution in prose was deliberately written for the
first number of the periodical. ‘ Hand and Soul,’ often as it has been
praised, has hardly had full recognition for the astonishing origin­
ality and assurance of its prose. That a man of twenty-one, un­
exercised in prose, incurious about the work of the masters of that
‘ other harmony,’ without any model— for the obligation to the
Stories After Nature of Charles Wells cannot be taken seriously—
should produce, at his first attempt, prose so distinctive and un-
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W. H. DEVERELL
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fumbling is really more wonderful than that he should write in

youth such a poem as ‘ The Blessed Damozel.’ There is no occasion
to look about for passages of special eloquence. The opening sen­
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tences, with their unobtrusive but very definite idiosyncrasy, will

suffice to remind us of the quality of this confident novice’s prose:

Before any knowledge of painting was brought to Florence, there

were already painters in Lucca, and Pisa, and Arezzo who feared
God and loved the art. The keen, grave workmen from Greece,
whose trade it was to sell their own works in Italy and teach Italians
to imitate them, had already found rivals of the soil with skill that
would forestall their lessons and cheapen their crucifixes and addo-
lorate, more years than is supposed before the art came at all into
Florence. The pre-eminence to which Cimabue was raised at once
by his contemporaries, and which he still retains to a wide extent
even in the modern mind, is to be accounted for, partly by the cir­
cumstances under which he arose, and partly by that extraordinary
purpose of fortune born with the lives of some few, and through
which it is not a little thing for any who went before if they are
even remembered as the shadows of the coming of such an one, and
the voices which prepared his way in the wilderness. It is thus,
almost exclusively, that the painters of whom I speak are now known.
They have left little, and but little heed is taken of that which men
hold to have been surpassed; it is gone like time gone— a track of
dust and dead leaves that merely led to the fountain.

There is a paragraph of not obviously heightened prose which,

doing its introductory business perfectly, does so much more than
its immediate business. And then there is the plausibility of the
unlaboured evidence, enviable by any professed writer of fiction,
the mythical Dr Amemster called in to testify to the quality of the
work of the invented Chiaro dell’ Erma, the cited exemplar of
that painter’s work. But for us here what matters most is that
‘ Hand and Soul,’ more than anything else between the wrappers
of the Germ, suggests the spiritual ideals of the movement, giving
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

to Pre-Raphaelitism a more intimate meaning than it had in the

penitential and yet largely exterior thought of Holman Hunt, the
sponge-like, absorbing and presently-to-be-squeezed-out mind of
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Millais.
In the first number of the Germ, at Woolner’s instance, the names
of authors had not been given; in the second, though Christina
Rossetti screened herself behind the pseudonym ‘ Ellen Alleyn,’
and F. G. Stephens behind ‘ John Seward,’ the identity of contri­
butors was generally revealed.
The second number opened with a piece, in rather feeble blank
verse, by James Collinson, its subject ‘ The Child Jesus,’ faced by
his not very impressive etching in illustration of it. On this followed
‘ A Pause of Thought,’ written by Christina Rossetti two years
earlier, when she was only seventeen, and showing how early she
was consciously seeking poetic fame and ‘ sick of hope deferred.’
The next item, an article by Stephens on *The Purpose and Tend­
ency of Early Italian Art,’ records with admiration that in English
landscape there had been ‘ an entire seeking after originality in a
more humble manner than has been practised since the decline of
Italian Art,’ only to urge English ‘ historical painters ’ to follow
that example. ‘ Historical ’ painting receives further attention, in a
brief, practical essay, never continued, by Ford Madox Brown.
Christina Rossetti reappears with a song, ‘ O h! roses for the flush
of youth.’ Other poems in this number are ‘ Morning Sleep,’ a
piece of some length by William Bell Scott, reprinted, with
modifications, in his Poems of 1875, and ‘ Stars and Moon ’
by Coventry Patmore, in that somewhat sententious second-best
manner of his. These last two contributions associate with the Germ
men who were never of the inner group, and who fell away from it,
Patmore comparatively soon, Scott at long last in circumstances of
posthumous scandal.
As I shall not return to Scott, I may say here that the final
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criticism of him exists not in any prose estimate but in the generous
yet frank elegy written by Swinburne. When William Minto, who
had been in touch with several members of the circle, gave the world
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the autobiographical notebooks of Scott, with their jealous and

occasionally very offensive references to his betters, Swinburne
hastened to dub Scott dauber and rhymer; but the earlier tribute
remains. Strenuous, unachieving, Scott, if hardly deserving of
study, remains above contempt.
To continue with an enumeration of the contents of the two subse­
quent numbers of the Germ is unnecessary. W.M.Rossetti remained
titular editor, but felt obliged to acquiesce in whatever was proposed
to him by the Tuppers, and in consequence, together with matter
by the original contributors, these numbers contained work by John
and George Tupper, written, it would seem, for the ribald student
public they valued, but disconcerting to readers who had had ‘ The
Blessed Damozel * and ‘ Dream Land.’

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IV

As an exhibition of certain novel and beautiful things, in poetry

rather than in graphic art, the Germ was and remains important;
but it had neither a consistent fighting policy, such as only a pro­
fessional literary journalist could have given it, nor funds, and its
circulation was much too small, its life much too short, for it to
affect more than a minute section of the public. But in any event its
principal contributors were coming before the public in another
place, in the Royal Academy, and it was over the new painting rather
than over the new poetry that, for some years, the battle was to be
fought.
Familiar as the facts are, it seems that few critics of Victorian
literature have understood, or at least duly emphasized, the tardi­
ness with which that new poetry, so clearly announced in the Germ,
came before the general body of readers. It is essential, if we would
see Rossetti and his associates with the eyes of their contemporaries,
to bear in mind that for the public, so far as it was made aware of
them, they were from, say, 1850 to well after i860 simply innova­
tory painters, not workers at once in literature and pictorial art. The
first wonderful volume of the poetry of William Morris, the trans­
lations of early Italian poets issued by Rossetti, the highly remark­
able * Queen Mother and Rosamund ’ of Swinburne, all work pub­
lished some years later than the date at which we have arrived, were
books which fell dead on appearance. Only Christina Rossetti’s
initial volume awoke any response. ‘ She,’ Swinburne always in­
sisted, ‘ was our Jael.’
Matters might have gone very differently. To be sure, Swinburne,
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the youngest of the group, and a poet who, as I have been at pains to
show in my Study of Swinburne, was slow to discover, or at least
to indulge, his exuberant lyrical genius, could have published no
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volume of miscellaneous lyrical work before 1863. ®ut had Dante

Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti and William Morris united to
issue in the ’fifties a small joint volume of poems, their com­
bined appeal could hardly have lacked considerable answer; and
the new painting was most easily approachable, was in fact later on
most commonly approached with sympathy, through the new
poetry.
Whether as painters or as poets, Rossetti and his associates de­
manded of intending students a rich, carefully discriminated
aesthetic experience. A good deal of their work could not be appre­
hended without initiation, and the agencies for such initiation were
to seek. They suffered from lack of an indirectly educative Press
for one thing, even more than, a generation later, the little men of
the ’nineties suffered from a criticism too well prepared to receive
them. But, undeniably, that they should have been dependent
in that way, that they should not have been directly apprehensible,
argues that, in at least part of their work, they were of the secondary
order of artists. In the work of their weaker moments, and in the
work of their disciples, it is impossible not to feel that there is some
exploitation of what is conventionally ‘ poetical,’ even though the
convention be novel. Their difficulty, in those weaker moments, the
difficulty of their disciples, may perhaps be best likened to that
which has been experienced by certain symbolists, even by so rare
and scrupulous a poet as Mr Yeats. The symbol, so finely signifi­
cant when the poet’s imagination first produced it, tends to be used
again and again, in an unconscious indolence of the imagination,
when a new symbol, exactly appropriate to the new poem, should
be fashioned by a fresh energy. With Rossetti’s group, and still more
with its disciples, we find from time to time a reliance on exotic,
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

antique, mystical accessories, which are used with an unjustified

confidence that their mere presence in the picture or poem will
give it high artistic value. Those accessories, to be sure, are exquisite;
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they are incomparably more valuable than the properties used by

the academic painters of 1850 or in such professedly romantic poetry
as Sir Walter Scott’s; but, fundamentally, that confidence has no
more justification than the academic painter’s belief in the power
of Mary Queen of Scots to give tragic significance to any com­
petently done picture of her execution. It was one of Rossetti’s
greatest services to the movement that, himself not infallible, he
insisted with so much force on the necessity of a constant renewal
of the energy by which the artist finds the new means for the new
task. Very dangerous to disciples who did not fully understand
him, he at least was usually vigilant in the perils of his method.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s is a poetry almost too concrete, often
grotesquely anthropocentric, and it is a poetry without relief. A
dreamer, to whom dreams came with the solidity and definition of
waking life, and whose every dream was heavily charged with sig­
nificance, he seemed almost always under one or other of those
mysterious compulsions which are imposed upon the somnambu­
list, hardly ever free, certainly never irresponsible. This, though
they find cruder words for it, is what people have in mind when
they complain of the oppressiveness of his work as a poet. It is
oppressive. The oppression begins with the metrical form, always
fine, of a poet never metrically spontaneous as his great sister almost
invariably was. Metres come to Swinburne with the pulses throbbing
in his head, intoxicate him, sweep him on to his best things and his
worst, delight him so much that he cannot always desist when his
subject has been expressed. Nothing of the sort ever happens with
Rossetti. There is a rich and sustained music in every sonnet, line
after line ‘ of its own arduous fulness reverent,’ but the music is an
accompaniment, strictly subordinated to the intellectual structure
32
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

and emotional development and pictorial effects of the poem, not

itself an inspiration. Indeed, I can think of only one passage in
Rossetti in which music has been allowed to have its uncontrolled
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way, but that is among the loveliest he wrote:

Poets’ fancies all are there:
There the elf-girls flood with wings
Valleys full of plaintive air;
There breathe perfumes; there in rings
Whirl the foam-bewildered springs;
Siren there
Winds her dizzy hair and sings.
And to the metrical oppression is added that resulting from his
refusal to admit into his House of Life anything which has not an
intimate association. He will not allow himself or his reader the
relief of indifferent things in that House which is a reliquary. Nor,
in admitting Nature, will he yield to her, content that the sun and
the sea should lighten his verse and reverberate in it with as much
or as little meaning as they have for us in our common experience
of them. The phenomena of Nature are admitted by him only on
condition that they enter his verse with a very personal significance,
reduced to symbols.

33
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A fter Rossetti and the Germ, William Morris and the Oxford and
Cambridge Magazine.
The Oxford and Cambridge, published by Bell and Daldy, was
financially the responsibility of Morris, though Richard Watson
Dixon was anxious to afford what help he could out of his small
means; and, if the three numbers to which Rossetti contributed be
left out of account, it was Morris who gave it literary importance.
All the same, the share Morris had in it can be exaggerated. Before
the appearance of the second number, February, 1856, editorial
control was transferred to Fulford, who had a salary of fio o a
year, for the year the magazine lived. As for the contents, like those
of every professedly artistic periodical issued in England, with the
solitary exception of the Savoy in the ’nineties, they were too mis­
cellaneous to point in any particular direction. Vernon and Godfrey
Lushington; the sociological and political journalist Bernard
Cracroft: I do not know, and am but languidly moved to ask, what
they were doing in the company of Morris and Rossetti.
Rossetti gave the magazine three highly characteristic poems:
‘ Nineveh,’ intellectually, I suppose, the greatest thing he ever did,
for the August number; the already printed ‘ Blessed Damozel,’ for
November; ‘ The Staff and the Scrip,’ for December. Morris, a
contributor to ten out of the twelve numbers, wrote for it eight
prose stories, five poems, an article on Amiens cathedral, an article
on certain engravings by Alfred Rethel, and in an all but unique
condescension to reviewing, certainly the only review he undertook
willingly, a notice of Browning’s ‘ Men and Women.’ One poem,
34
 To. I. JANUARY, 1856. PRICE Is. f§ z
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^ 1 w
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CONDUCTED BY MEMBERS OF THE I

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TWO UNIVERSITIES.
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CONTENTS.
Page
S ib P h il ip S id n e y . P abt L T he P relu de Mtxufaj 1
A lf r e d T en n yson . A n E ssay. In T hree P a r ts. Part! i&5
T h e C o u s i n s ........................................................................................ 18
T he S to ry of th e U nknow n C hurch hun^cj. 28
T h e R i v a l s ........................................................................................ 84
T h e S on g o f H i a w a t h a . B y H e n r y W a d sw o rth L o n g­
fello w ....................................................... 45
E s s a y on t h e N e w c o m e s ....................................................... 50
K in g s l e y ' s S e r m o n s f o b t h e T im e s . . . . 61
W in t e r W e a t h e r . A P oem . hufruJ • 62

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LONDON:
P§ 1
B E L L AND D A LD Y , F L E E T STREET.

PRINTED BY C. WHITTINGHAH, TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE.

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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

‘ Winter Weather,’ was left in the files; the others were included in
The Defence of Guenevere, issued two years later. The prose stories
Morris persistently undervalued.
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One of those tales, certainly, is of little worth. ‘ Frank’s Sealed

Letter,’ an excursion into the modern world, has, however, its
interest as evidence to the truth that near things were as remote to
its author as remote things were near. For Morris was never more
archaic, in the unhappy sense, than in this awkward approach to
contemporary life, the things he had seen with physical eyes re­
ceding from him into an odd, dim, distant world. But the other
tales, if they have not the perfection of the late romances, have the
peculiar charm of young work, the dew still on the just discovered
roses. In the world of Morris it is never noon, with its challenge to
the artist to render full illumination, but always either morning or
evening, with a sun the rays of which can be rendered in a con­
vention applicable only to sunrise and sunset, with an atmosphere
of hopeful adventurousness, the chances of the day before one, or of a
luxuriously and wholesomely achieved retrospect, and with the values
that colours have as they emerge from grey or are about to disappear
into darkness. The oblique rays here are those of morning.
Even lovelier than the prose, which for good and evil has not yet
been thoroughly conventionalized, is the inset verse. There are not
ten things even in our mystery-haunted poetry to set beside the
miraculous song of Margaret in * The Hollow Land ’ :

Christ keep the Hollow Land

All the summer-tide;
Still we cannot understand
Where the waters glide;
Only dimly seeing them
Coldly slipping through
Many green-lipp’d cavern mouths
Where the hills are blue.
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VI

T h e world of William Morris, taken as a whole, is the sanest and

most happily ordered that any modern English writer has made.
* How I love the earth and the seasons and weather, and all things
that deal with them, and all that grows out of them,’ he wrote: no
one has loved these things in so complete a contentment with just
what they are, without romantical fuss over them; no one has been
so happy in appreciating the succession of the seasons and the pro­
priety of what each brings with it.

Many scarlet bricks there were

In its walls, and old grey stone;
Over which red apples shone
At the right time of the year.

‘ At the right time of the year ’ : if ever a single word gave us a poet’s
attitude towards the world, the epithet ‘ right ’ gives us the attitude
of Morris. But here, in the volume from which I quote, The Defence
of Guenevere, as nowhere else in Morris, there is at times a strange
distortion of natural things, the trees of the conventional landscape
twisted by an evil wind, the hills heaped up and dwindled as in a
brain-sick traveller’s changing fancies, almost all things brought too
near or removed to a terrifying distance, the very sun swung out of
its course and the moon become a menace. Those fierce and con­
vulsive poems, ‘ The Defence ’ itself and ‘ Arthur’s Tomb,’ are the
work of one who was to be the writer of the most equably and
naturally flowing narrative that we have, and their movement is
widdershins, and the words come to us in gasps.
38
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Cartoon
D. G. ROSSETTI
(including portraits of Swinburne and Christina Rossetti)
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

Take the great passages in ‘ The Defence ’ ; and first the presenta­
tion by the queen to her accusers of the parable of the cloths of
Heaven and Hell. It is what Pater was to call Browning’s, * a poetry
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of situations,’ and no doubt in that respect produced under the in­

fluence of Browning, but with how much originality, all the same!

Listen, suppose your time were come to die,

And you were quite alone and very weak;
Yea, laid a dying while very mightily

The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak

Of river through your broad lands running well:
Suppose a hush should come, then someone speak:

‘ One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,

Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be,
I will not tell you, you must somehow tell . . .’

After a shivering half-hour you said,

‘ God help! heaven’s colour, the blue ’ ; and he said, ‘ hell.’
Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,

And cry to all good men that loved you well,

‘ Ah Christ! if only I had known, known, known ’ ;
Lancelot went away, then I could tell,

Like wisest man, how all things would be, moan,

And roll and hurt myself, and long to die,
And yet fear much to die for what was sown.

There was hardly an intelligent contemporary writer of verse who

could not have managed the transitions better than they are managed
in this poem and in ‘ Arthur’s Tomb ’ ; there was not one capable
of quite Morris’s fierce hold on situation. The very defects have a
kind of merit, in speeches of stammering or hysterical passion, as
when Guinevere breaks into the purely feminine, in itself inade­
39
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

quate, in its context so effective, outcry— ‘ O bad! bad! ’ And, at

the greatest height reached in these poems, there is the utterance
of Guenevere wounding herself in wounding Lancelot with such
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edged and poisoned words as these:

Banner of Arthur— with black-bended shield

Sinister-wise across the fair gold ground

Here let me tell you what a knight you are,
O sword and shield of Arthur! you are found
A crooked sword, I think, that leaves a scar

On the bearer’s arm, so be he thinks it straight,

Twisted Malay’s crease beautiful blue-grey,
Poison’d with sweet fruit; as he found too late,
My husband Arthur, on some bitter day!

O sickle cutting hemlock the day long!

That the husbandman across his shoulder hangs,
And, going homeward about evensong,
Dies the next morning, struck through by the fangs!

In these things, and less spasmodically in * Sir Peter Harpdon’s

End ’ and ‘ The Haystack in the Floods,’ there is the one quality of
great poetry which the later work of Morris, so much more finished,
lacked: the quality of intensity. Something went out of his poetry
with the passing of not many years, as something went out of Ros­
setti’s, out of Swinburne’s.
In Rossetti’s case and in Swinburne’s, partial explanations, to my
mind of little value, can be found in physical causes and in circum­
stances, and there are those who may be content to say ‘ chloral ’
or * Putney.’ But perhaps this new poetry had on it some doom, was
not related quite closely enough to what in life is inexhaustible
material for the artist, was the poetry of men who could not profit
40
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as artists by the whole of their experience. Here it becomes neces­

sary to be careful, for with a good deal, especially at first, in common
these poets have very definite individualities, and it is quite certain
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that neither with them nor with any other group, school, or move­
ment shall we find identity of aim, as with men banded together for
some political or other exterior purpose.
Rossetti’s exclusion of so much of himself from his poetry is far
from being without parallel: most poets have chosen to express but
a small part of themselves, and it is at the cost of his poetry that
an exception, Wordsworth, puts the whole of himself into verse.
But Rossetti’s choice, wise certainly in itself, is perhaps on a broad
view of poetry too fastidious a rejection of material not evidently
to the poet’s purpose. The poet, to be sure, must admit into his
verse nothing that is not poetry, but after all it is for transmutation
of base metal that we praise the alchemist. One insinuates so much
under rebuke by a memory of ‘ Jenny,’ and acknowledging that,
since not everything can be done with any one instrument, Rossetti
was in the main right to limit himself; the point is merely that the
poet was so much more limited than the man. Morris, who made the
production of poetry seem more natural than any other poet of our
time has made it, also eventually made it seem incidental, one
activity out of many, not more important than weaving at the loom
or any other craftsman’s labour. But the greatest poetry is the sub­
lime summary of the poet’s whole experience. With Swinburne,
who gave himself completely to poetry, there was hope that it
would be; and, indeed, in one volume, his best, it is. That volume,
Songs Before Sunrise, in just eulogy of which he said ‘ my other
books are books, it is myself,’ gives us Swinburne in vividly realized
relationship to the prime energies of nature and most permanent
passions of mankind. But, on the whole, and especially after 1880,
Swinburne was too much a song to be a singer, poetry having ceased
to be his achievement in becoming his existence, so that, among other
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

consequences, a prosodist’s praise of his later technique may irritate

us like a physiologist’s praise of the technique of a man breathing.
In one way or another, these poets seem destined to a less satis­
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fying or less enduring relationship between their poetry and normal

human experience than we find in most of the very greatest. Per­
haps it is the destiny of Romanticism, the price it must pay for its
peculiar successes, more valuable to the modern spirit, certainly,
than classic successes, that it should be in some such precarious
relationship. Or, to speak more carefully, perhaps it is the destiny
of a thoroughly conscious Romanticism.

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VII

I t is in an increasingly conscious allegiance to its ideal that the

poetry of the Romantics differs from that of their predecessors. The
romantic element is everywhere in English poetry. Ostensibly ex­
cluded in the eighteenth century, after the magnificent excesses of
the Elizabethan age and the ‘ fair and flagrant things ’ which de­
lighted the poets of the next generation, it creeps in, not only with
Collins and Dyer and the Thomson of certain passages, but with
the condemning phrases of its enemies, unsuspected, as in Johnson’s
protest against those who would ‘ number the streaks of the tulip,’
and in Pope’s mocking

Die of a rose in aromatic pain.

Johnson himself exemplifies, for all his outer John Bullishness, that
‘ hunger of the imagination which preys on life,’ and anticipates
Rossetti’s admirable requirement that poetry should be ‘ amusing ’
in praising Coriolanus as ‘ one of the most amusing of our author’s
performances.’ It is not a new thing that the Romantics, from
Blake and Coleridge onwards, bring into English poetry; it is a new
consciousness of its importance. With the Victorian Romantics
that consciousness has become acute, to their gain and their peril.
It is a question whether the error of those who would serve
beauty with too exclusive and purposed an art is not almost as
serious as that of those who would use art for the direct magnifica­
tion of God. In Rossetti, at any rate, only not in ‘ Jenny ’ and ‘ Nine­
veh ’ and some four or five other pieces, there is a concentration on
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the purely aesthetic effect which, in a kind of search for short cuts to
beauty, has its dangers, as the view of life taken at one period by
William Morris, his human figures appearing to be worked on
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tapestry against a world that is just so much decor, has others. But
we need not suppose either Morris or Rossetti ignorant of the perils
and limitations of aesthetic and conventionalized poetry. A well-
known criticism by Morris of Swinburne, betraying misapprehen­
sion of its immediate subject, shows him well aware of the import­
ance of full life in poetry. And as for Rossetti, after Coleridge the
least fallible of all English poets in treatment of the principles of
art, I need cite only a certain letter of his, dated 1855, to William
Allingham. He is censuring a piece by his friend because it ‘ chiefly
awakens contemplation, like a walk on a fine day with a churchyard
in it,’ whereas it should rouse one ‘ like a part of one’s own life,’ and
leave one ‘ to walk it off as one might live it off.’

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VIII

T he capital truth about William Morris was stated in that pas­

sage of Mr Mackail’s admirable biography in which, admitting that
Morris never worked as an architect, he said that it was always in
the spirit of the architect that Morris worked. Unique in the modern
world, William Morris worked always from the centre, caring little
what portion of the circumference he struck in his energetic ex­
cursions. In a sense, and of course, he was an amateur. What else
could a man be who was poet, designer, printer, and, in the over­
flow of his vitality, reformer of economic and social conditions?
In each department, the expert may question the legitimacy of his
success. Those Kelmscott publications, are they in the central
tradition of great printing? That typography, that decoration, do
they not get rather too much between the reader and the thing to be
conveyed to him? In regard to poetry, especially, since the mere
writing down of it is a materialization which the absolute lover of
poetry must resent, is not that way of conveying, say, Chaucer to
us the result of a misconception of his need and ours ? Should a
wallpaper, which will be a background for pictures, be a thing so
nearly competitive with them ?
For myself, I think Whistler’s book, The Gentle Art of Making
Enemies, a more precise and scrupulous adjustment of means to
ends than any publication for which Morris was responsible, and I
do not doubt that Whistler had generally a juster feeling for the
limits within which decoration is lawful. But Whistler remains for
the most part, only not in the portraits of his mother and of Carlyle,
the butterfly of his signature, and Morris was very much a man.
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

Whistler, with the whole science of each of his instruments, is never

an amateur: no, not even, though Mr Max Beerbohm has urged the
contrary, in his prose. Whistler is an expert who happens to be a
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specialist in several mediums. He gets his effects unerringly, by an

exquisite care in choosing out of the gross profusion of life what is
to his purpose, but also by narrowing that purpose till his work, the
two supreme portraits and a very few other things apart, becomes
very slight. Morris, with a more obvious convention, has an im­
mensely wider purpose. He is alone among the artists of the group
in this, that instead of drawing in to his centre, he strikes out from
it in every direction.
If there was any development in Morris, it was in his poetry, and
it was not altogether fortunate. He began by recreating, in that
wonderful first volume The Defence of Guenevere, the life of the
Middle Ages, apprehended with faultless intuition, but from with­
out. He proceeded by allowing himself to be drawn into the Middle
Ages, as if Columbus should dwindle into a colonist, forgetting the
excitement of discovery. It is not exactly a poet who addresses us in
The Earthly Paradise, rather a worker of tapestry who has taken verse
for his medium. The craftsmanship is, in its sort, perfect, with an
instinctive subdual of the separate line lest it should stand out ex­
cessively in the pattern. But this is not, in the full sense, creation; it is
the leisurely, unemphatic display of figures no more real than those
on tapestry. With the Norse influence there is a return to creation.
There is no more the effect of stories told by aged, wearied men who
would value them rather for the equable flow of narrative than for
any pungency of characterization or intensity of emotion. Some­
thing larger and looser and much more nearly epic has come into
the verse, which, all the same, has neither the clairvoyance nor the
edge of the first great immature volume, and in which there is no
trace of the wizardry of three or four of the strangest early poems.
Apart from these works, there are the late lyrics, undervalued as it
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seems to me, with their peculiar beauty in the treatment of gracious,

homely things, and a kind of unexcited appreciation of the tender­
ness of human affections to which there is no parallel, and there are
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those prose romances, the most purely happy books in modern

English literature, reaching back into the past or anticipating a
fortunate future. But nowhere is there the perfected work of that
poet who was announced in the Defence of Guenevere volume.
Outside the arts, there is that development which turned the idle
singer of an empty day into an active Socialist; but there is nothing
more in all that than the discovery of hostility between the modern
factory-dominated world and the conditions of joyous and efficient
artistic production. Morris has become aware of another portion
of the circumference, and strikes out at it, but it is from the same
centre that he issues, burly and choleric and benevolent, to do the
job that had escaped attention. With a good head, and a good heart,
and good hands, a man could do anything that needed doing. He was
highly capable, in a hurry, and short-tempered with the secrets of
the several arts and with economics. He took things in his stride,
and got back to his centre, ready for the next day’s work, in what­
ever direction it might lie, and made no fuss about what he had
done or would do. Various as his achievements were, they were very
decidedly one man’s, and it was so that he worked, like the ship’s
captain that he looked, or a farmer, or an all-round craftsman. The
pedantry of applying specialized aesthetic measuring instruments
to what he did in so many departments is rebuked by the per­
sonality of so great, simple, hasty and universal a creature. To judge
him by what he did in any one matter is like judging a man’s life
by what he does on Mondays.

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IX

T he relation of Coventry Patmore, never admitted by himself,

to what four years later was to be called Pre-Raphaelitism was
acutely perceived in 1844 by Bulwer Lytton. Patmore’s early verse
had been received in some quarters with abuse. Thus a reviewer in
Blackwood, shrewd enough to suspect that the younger generation
of poets were drawing on Keats and Shelley, had cried out on the
appearance of Patmore’s volume, ‘ This is the life into which the
slime of the Keateses (sic) and Shelleys of former times has fecund­
ated.’ But Bulwer Lytton, in a queerly phrased, oddly punctuated,
intelligently discriminating letter to the young poet, put his finger
on almost every virtue and defect, deprecating the intrusion of prose
matter, warning him against excessive particularity: ‘ It seems to
me that, in common with Tennyson, you cultivate details to the
injury of the broad whole.’
Patmore was already, in his ownway,practising Pre-Raphaelitism.
Brought into contact with the group, through Woolner, in 1849,
and drawn more especially towards Holman Hunt, he remained
intimate with most of its members till 1853. They applauded his
often repeated, ‘ It is the last rub that polishes the mirror ’ ; they
were impressed by his blunt declaration that even Tennyson’s best
work was ‘ not finished from within.’ For a while he was to several
of them that most useful counsellor who is at once sympathetic and
detached. But for the accident of Patmore’s prolonged absence from
London after the death of his first wife, he might have maintained
with D. G. Rossetti the friendship he tried too late to revive. But his
relation was to Pre-Raphaelitism proper, not to that development
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in which Rossetti, Morris, Burne-Jones, and in a way Swinburne,

were the dominating figures. His affinity was with the early Holman
Hunt, and with the Millais of ‘ The Woodman’s Daughter,’ a subject
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taken from his poems. Realistic, with a purpose far other than the
usual realist’s, and destined to become the celebrant of that
supreme mystery of God’s love for the soul of man, Patmore was
not for long moving on lines parallel to those on which his friends
advanced.

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who was two years younger than Rossetti, and

S e b a s t ia n E v a n s ,
outlived Swinburne by two years, was never of Rossetti’s circle,
but in later life was intimate with Burne-Jones, and in his passion
for the medieval and in the ease with which he turned from poetry
to applied art had a good deal in common with William Morris.
Member of a family which in three generations showed exceptional
versatility, he was perhaps predestined to dissipate his energy in too
many directions, yet there seems to be some personal capriciousness
in his repeated transfer of devotion from painting, wood-carving,
and designing for a glass factory to journalism, political agitation,
legal work; poetry and antiquarian research seldom getting more
than his spare hours. No doubt his version of the old French ro­
mance of Perceval, The High History of the Holy Graal, and his study
of the legend, In Quest of the Holy Graal, count for more than his
poems, most of the best of which were contained in Brother Fabian’s
Manuscript, 1865. But the blend of Pre-Raphaelite colour with an
individual humour gives many of his poems distinction. After
Richard Watson Dixon, with whom he had also a less technical
affinity, he is perhaps the most successful Victorian user of terza
rima; and Dudman in Paradise is a curiously fortunate blend of
reverence and mockery.
His sister Anne, who was born in 1820 and died in 1870, had
probably more talent for music than for poetry. At least, she found
comfort in ‘ the tangible restraints ’ of its laws, whereas ‘ the more
indefinite freedom ’ of painting and poetry often, as her brother
noted, ‘ oppressed and alarmed her.’ She wrote, however, one piece
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

with a queer, simple magic in it, coming for that moment into the
line of succession from the Christina Rossetti of Goblin Market to
the Mary Coleridge of so many fantasies.
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Tirlywirly, all alone,

Spinning under a yew;
Something came with no noise,
But Tirlywirly knew.

Tirlywirly sate spinning,

Never looked around;
Something made a black shadow
Creep on the ground.

Tirlywirly sate spinning,

Spinning fast for fear;
Something spoke a dark word
Close at her ear . . .

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XI

T heDark Blue, 1871-1873, founded by John C. Freund in the

belief that, independently of any particular group or generation of
Oxford undergraduates, there was an Oxford point of view, had
no very definite aim. From the first it contained a proportion of
commonplace matter, and in its third volume it became merely
one of the magazines of its day. Still, its contributors included
W. M. Rossetti, Dr Franz Hueffer, H. D. Traill, Andrew Lang,
Sir Sidney Colvin, W. H. Mallock, and, much more to our
purpose, D. G. Rossetti, Swinburne, Simeon Solomon, Arthur
O’Shaughnessy.
Rossetti’s contribution was the poem ‘ Down Stream,’ illustrated
by almost the only significant drawing published by the Dark Blue,
a drawing by Ford Madox Brown of a man and a girl embracing in
a boat, the girl’s full, poetical yet homely face admirably observed
in the innocent animalism with which it accepts love. The one other
drawing worth looking at is Simeon Solomon’s design for the poem
by Swinburne, here entitled ‘ The End of the Month,’ but after­
wards printed in the second series of Poems and Ballads as ‘ At a
Month’s End.’ It is stated in the Dictionary of National Biography
that this magnificent poem, the finest of Swinburne’s few poems of
passion as distinguished from erotic fever, was inspired by Solomon’s
design; but the design is dated 1871, and the poem, the original
manuscript of which I have examined, is almost certainly of earlier
date. It is true that Swinburne was sometimes moved to poetry by
the pictures of his friends: if he did not get his first inspiration
for ‘ Before the Mirror ’ from Whistler’s beautiful painting of Jo
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

Heffernan,1 he reshaped the piece as a tribute to Whistler, and he

wrote * Cleopatra ’ for the drawing by Frederick Sandys. But work
of the quality of ‘ At a Month’s End ’ is no more likely to be pro­
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duced while putting words to a picture than while putting words to

a tune. There is, however, Swinburne’s own authority for the
ascription of ‘ Erotion ’ to the influence of a drawing by Solomon.
But the more interesting point of contact between Swinburne and
the painter is in the poet’s long article, in the Dark Blue: ‘ Simeon
Solomon: Notes on his “ Vision of Love ” and other Studies.’
Since Swinburne, who came, naturally enough, to despise the
character of Solomon, never reprinted the essay, it does not lie to
the hand of the ordinary reader, and I may quote a typical passage.
Writing of the persons in the pictures of this Hellenist of the
Hebrews, he says:

There is a questioning wonder in their faces, a fine joy and a faint

sorrow, a trouble as of water stirred, a delight as of thirst appeased.
Always, at feast or sacrifice, in chamber or in field, the air and car­
riage of their beauty has something in it of strange: hardly a figure
but has some touch, though never so delicately slight, either of
eagerness or of weariness, some note of expectation or of satiety,
some semblance of outlook or inlook: but prospective or intro­
spective, an expression is there which is not pure Greek, a shade or
tone of thought or feeling beyond Hellenic contemplation; whether
it be oriental or modem in its origin, and derive from national or
personal sources. This passionate sentiment of mystery seems at
times to ‘ o’erinform its tenement ’ of line and colour, and impress
itself even to perplexity upon the sense of the spectator.

And he goes on to remark of Solomon’s one essay in literature,

that ‘ read by itself as a fragment of spiritual allegory, this written
“ Vision of Love revealed in Sleep ” seems to want even that much
1 The poem, the original manuscript of which I have examined in Mr. Wise’s
collection, was developed out of three of the four stanzas of ‘ A Dreamer,’ written
in 1862.
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

coherence which is requisite to keep symbolic or allegorical art

from absolute dissolution or collapse.’ The complaint is just. ‘ The
Vision of Love revealed in Sleep,’ written in 1869 during a visit to
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Oscar Browning in Rome, privately printed in 1871, enlarged and

published in the same year, remains, nevertheless, an amateur effort
in prose of extraordinary if only incidental merit.
With Simeon Solomon, and not simply because drink and per­
versity ruined him, making him for the last thirty years of his life an
outcast from even the least censorious circles of Bohemia, the
decadence has begun in painting as in a poetical prose. The facts of
his career are hardly familiar, his achievement, such as it was, has
scarcely been considered with any seriousness since Swinburne’s
essay. The youngest son of a manufacturer of Leghorn hats who
was the first Jew to be admitted a freeman of the City of London,
Simeon was born at 3 Sandys Street, Bishopsgate Without, on the
9th of October, 1840. His sister Rebecca, herself an artist, and
almost as much at the mercy of disastrous impulses, instructed him,
with important artistic consequences, in Hebrew history and ritual.
His elder brother Abraham, who had exhibited at the Royal
Academy from his seventeenth year, who had developed suddenly
in 1854 an originality of which earlier work gave no promise, and
who, after a popular success in 1857 with ‘ Waiting for the Verdict,’
had markedly gone off, taught Simeon drawing in his studio. As
precocious as Abraham, and with a much subtler temperament,
Simeon was in the Royal Academy schools at fifteen and in his
eighteenth year showed at the Royal Academy his ‘ Isaac Offered.’
There quickly followed ‘ the finely drawn and composed ’ ‘ Finding
of Moses ’ of Thackeray’s praise, a picture the novelist credited with
‘ a great intention,’ ‘ The Child Jeremiah ’ and other paintings, with
ten drawings illustrative of Jewish ceremonies, eight designs for
‘ The Song of Solomon ’ and eight for ‘ The Book of Ruth,’ as well as
illustrations in Once a Week. The influence of D. G. Rossetti, Burne-
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ANGELI LAUDANTES

Morris Tapestry from Design by Burne-Jones

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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

Jones and Swinburne, with perhaps some anxiety to get clear of the
purely Hebraic, then turned him towards classical subjects. The
admirable * Bacchus ’ of 1867 aroused the ardent admiration of
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Walter Pater, and the earlier and slightly later work, together with
his very remarkable prose composition, ‘ A Vision of Love revealed
in Sleep,’ were eulogized by Swinburne in the Dark Blue in 1871.
But, after showing ‘ The Toilet of a Roman Lady,’ 1869, ‘ Love
Bound and Wounded,’ 1870, ‘ Judith and her Attendant,’ 1872,
Simeon Solomon collapsed into ways of life in which he produced
little but those drawings, sanguines many of them, which he did
in an hour or two for a few shillings, and which are still common in
the windows of the baser dealers. At one time he was an exception­
ally ill-recompensed pavement artist in Bayswater. Latterly, he was
almost always lodged in St Giles’s workhouse, and it was there that,
three months after having been found unconscious in Great Turn­
stile, he died of heart failure on the 14th of August, 1905.
Limited as he was, extremely monotonous as he became in the
last twenty years of his life, weak as was his drawing, Simeon
Solomon was a man of rare genius. Nor was his range quite so
narrow as examination of his hack work suggests. I have seen a
drawing of his, done a few years before his collapse, a hasty enough
sketch in chalk of the head of a child, in which, out of an almost
uncontoured face, there look those eyes, without a thought behind
them yet arousing thought in us, that are the authentic eyes of a
child. With those eyes and an irresolute, half-petulant mouth, it is
a thing in one way meaningless, in another with the whole meaning
of childhood. But, of course, as a rule Simeon Solomon has only too
much meaning in his refined, tenuous commerce with symbols that
may seem at one moment those of sanctity and at another those of
lust. Between these extremes, there are those pictures and drawings
in which, from time to time, Solomon has reproduced without com­
ment the stolid, sombre faces of rabbis or Greek priests intent on
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

their ritual, and others in which ritual is rendered with a decadent

appreciation and in which he becomes almost an illustrator for some
of the Roman Catholic poems of Ernest Dowson and Lionel John­
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son. But, in a final choice of what was most significant in this artist,
we may well select those designs in which weary, lovely faces yearn
to each other with epicene passion in some moment of wakening or
relapse into sleep, and if one picture is to suffice, it might be that
reproduced as frontispiece to this volume.
Burne-Jones, in his modesty, in the earnestness which underlies
and overlies the fun so carefully kept out of his work, is an artist
who proposed by taking thought to add a cubit to his stature.
Aware, when he had emerged from discipleship to Rossetti, of his
inadequacy as a draughtsman, he proceeded, at the urging, I seem
to have somewhere heard or read, of Watts, but in obedience really
to his own conscience, to develop a very careful, delicate, and elabo­
rate method of drawing. He appears never to have doubted that his
progress here was all gain, never to have suspected the truth that
in art no man is the better for an irrelevant merit however honour­
ably acquired. His work, fundamentally, had no need of that
draughtsmanship, which remains a conscious and somewhat timid
accomplishment, never becoming a natural and indispensable means
of expression, used with the easy vigour of a master who puts his
hand on a familiar instrument. The picture, beautifully conceived
in other terms, has all that draughtsmanship applied to it, with a
piety one must respect, with a certain incidental success, but after
all without necessity. At best, the draughtsmanship gives one a
separable pleasure; often it is a sheer irrelevancy. And all that
loving care to make each square inch of canvas charming in colour
and surface, excellent as is its motive and pleasing as is usually the
result, betrays a misunderstanding, we need not say of art, but at
least of his own genius. For Burne-Jones was not of those, not all of
them great masters, with whom line and colour and surface can be
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

adequately eloquent. He had an angel as some have had a devil; an

angel, somewhat ineffectual as the robust may think, without any
urgent or indeed very specific message; and his true success was
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but to make us aware of that gracious presence, a presence, not a

power, at pause, and so pure as to be almost devoid of character.

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XII

T h e closeness and the duration of Swinburne’s association with

Rossetti’s group have constantly been exaggerated. After a minute
study of his career, some of the results of which I have summarized
in another book, I am convinced that Pre-Raphaelitism was an
interruption in Swinburne’s natural literary development. Nearly all
the main artistic enthusiasms of Swinburne can be dated back to
his twelfth, his thirteenth or his fourteenth year. At the moment
when, in 1857 and at Oxford, he was brought into contact with
Rossetti, William Morris and Burne-Jones, he was deeply engaged
in imitative work preparatory to the achievements of his brilliant
prime, and his models were not those peculiarly honoured in Ros­
setti’s circle. At that moment, and later, he was composing, with
an unparalleled mimetic art and almost incredible self-denial,
dramas in which the defects no less than the merits of Fletcher were
exactly reproduced, without the slightest infusion of modern or
distinctively Swinburnian lyricism. In 1857-9 he was meditating
or writing such pieces as ‘ The Laws of Corinth,’ ‘ Laugh and Lie
Down,’ ‘ The Loyal Servant,’ dramas on a model with which no
one in the Rossetti circle was familiar. He was absorbed also in the
study of Border ballads, with a juster enthusiasm for the starkness
of the original poetry, so far as it could be divined through the
corruptions and improvements to which it had been subjected, than
Rossetti ever felt. He was devoted to Landor, to Hugo, writers alien
to his new friends, and had already entered on his passionately
sympathetic study of iEschylus.
Encountering the members of the Rossetti circle, he was
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

temporarily drawn aside from his true course, by Morris rather

than Rossetti, in 1857-8, and until 1860-1 was periodically doing
work under their influence.
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The least pictorial and particularizing of our poets, Swinburne

had no real sympathy with Pre-Raphaelitism, strictly so-called; but
he had an ardent admiration for what by 1857 was developing out
of it. To be sure, as I have already said, it was a thing rather beside
his own purpose, and though his admiration for his new friends was
maintained, with but the slightest modification, to the end of his
life, Rossettian and Morrisian influences can hardly be detected in
his work after 1864 or 1865, and an even earlier terminal date might
be hazarded.
Stepping a little aside from his own course, he placed himself for
the first two or three of those six or seven years at the feet rather
of the bluff and accessible William Morris than at those of the
then aloof Rossetti. His very earliest extant poem, ‘ A Vigil,’ out of
which, when a certain Baudelairean element had been added, grew
‘ The Leper ’ of the first series of Poems and Ballads, was Morris
with only a faint difference. Here are the unpublished verses of the
first draft, almost all of them deleted when the piece was refashioned:

The night grows very old: almost

One hears the morning’s feet move on.
That flower is like a lily’s ghost
On the black water— only one.

I thought she was not dying; feel

How cold her naked feet are grown!
I dare not either sit or kneel;
The flesh is stiffened to the bone.

I kissed these feet; never again

Will she kiss me or any man.
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

Now she seems quiet though the pain

Has left her very forehead wan.
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I fear that she will turn or speak

To me, as yesterday she did;
Those are not tear-stains on her cheek,
Nor wrinkles on her eye’s white lid.

She said ‘ Be kind to me, I grow

So tired without you, I shall die
If you say nothing ’ ; even so,
And she is dead now verily.

I wonder if she could just move

That shut close mouth and speak at all,
If she would say ‘ I did not love.’
How heavily her gown’s folds fall!

Nay I will shut across her breast

Those thin grey palms held out so straight;
It hurts not me to let her rest
A little; also I can wait.

I am grown blind with all these things.

It may be now she hath in sight
A better knowledge; still there clings
The old question, Will not God do right ?

The influence of Morris appears, sometimes more decisively, in

many other early pieces held back by Swinburne from print, in
‘ The Death of Rudel ’ and ‘ Rudel in Paradise,’ in the fragment,
apparently written in 1859,1 beginning:
1 This piece exists on the back of the MS. of one of the quasi-Elizabethan son­
nets which Mr Wise and Sir Edmund Gosse printed for private circulation as
Undergraduate Sonnets in 1918, but was not there reproduced in print. One of
these sonnets, utterly unlike its fellows, is purely Rossettian, and fixes 1859 as the
date when Rossetti became more influential with Swinburne than Morris.
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 dnbppgraiiUAfp JPajiprs,
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1858.

“ And gladly wolde we learn and gladly teach.”

C haucer.

OXFORD:
PRINTED AND PUBL'SHED BY W. MANSELL, HIOH STREET.
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As she sits in her father’s house,

Full many thoughts there lie asleep
Under the patience of her brows,
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Under her eyes so dear and deep.

Again, the other and more intense Morris, the author of ‘ Sir Peter
Harpdon’s End,’ is found affecting Swinburne in ‘ The Queen’s
Tragedy,’ which was written in 1859-60, and remained in manuscript
till in 1919 Mr Wise caused thirty copies to be printed for private
use. It should be added, however, that both in phrasing and in
versification this piece shows less dependence on Morris than the
poems just mentioned.
But the composition to which we must mainly direct ourselves
is the first printed of Swinburne’s poems, ‘ Queen Yseult,’ Canto I
of which appeared in Undergraduate Papers.
To what was most distinctive in that development out of a short­
lived Pre-Raphaelitism, that phase of Romanticism associated with
the names of Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, Burne-
Jones, no substantial contribution was made by Swinburne. But
moving for a while after them, then for a while parallel to them,
rather than exactly with them, he supplemented their efforts in
several important respects. For one thing, he and he alone in some
sort linked Victorian English with the slightly earlier French Ro­
manticism. He was till 1862, when Hugo’s thanks for his champion­
ship deprived him of all feeling for the master’s limitations, the
disciple of the chief French Romantic, and for the next forty years
that master’s idolatrous worshipper. He was the earliest English
admirer of Baudelaire, of Gautier. Rossetti and Morris may have
remained unaware of the importance of this flank movement by
Swinburne, and indeed its importance was not clear till some twenty-
five or thirty years later, but it did a good deal, in time, to diminish
the isolation of the Victorian Romantics, to encourage a view of
them according to which they, simply as Romantics had great
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

though remote and imperfectly recognized allies in European

literature. With the acclimatization of exotics, they began to look
less alien.
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Then Swinburne provided that which English Romanticism had

lacked since the death of Shelley, an extravagant lyrical passion for
liberty, a vehement sympathy with liberty-seeking movements
throughout the world. Rossetti, moved once to the noble sonnet on
the refusal of aid between nations, was profoundly incurious about
politics. Morris, ceasing eventually to be the idle singer of an empty
day, became a very active and rather pathetic Socialist, wasting his
time on the dreariest people, but had no Shelleyan impulse, only, at
bottom, a craftsman’s discontent with conditions unfavourable to
good craftsmanship. Through Swinburne, so far as he could be
taken for a typical member of the group, it was linked not only
vaguely to French Romanticism, but to the great age of English
Romanticism.
The claims thus made for Swinburne should, however, be quali­
fied at two points. Impressive as was the success in 1865 of Atalanta
in Calydon, it had been preceded by Christina Rossetti’s victory
with Goblin Market. Again, it cannot be doubted that the scandal
of the Poems and Ballads in 1866 was prejudicial to the group, and
it is improbable that Rossetti would have suffered in 1871 if ‘ Laus
Veneris ’ and ‘ Anactoria ’ and ‘ Dolores ’ had not resulted in the
formation of a kind of vigilance organization.
On the other hand, it must be urged that, at any rate from 1867,
when Swinburne began to contribute critical prose to the Fortnightly
Review, he did more than anyone else to prepare the fittest part of the
public for appreciation of the work of the group. Had he not brought
his association with the Spectator, where he had defended Mere­
dith’s Modern Love and Baudelaire’s poems, to an end by a double
hoax, or had Moxon’s project of a periodical to be edited by Swin­
burne not been abandoned, the general body of readers might well
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have been brought before 1870 into a frame of mind reasonably

sympathetic. For the early criticism of Swinburne, as we have it
in the papers on Hugo, Meredith, Baudelaire, Theophile, and the
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Fortnightly essays on Arnold and Morris, was not only more lucid
than much of the work of his later life; it expressed a highly con­
tagious enthusiasm, and secured an emotional response even where
its argument was not likely to be altogether effective.

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XIII

Ja m es T was of no group, was in truth among the most

h o m so n
solitary of our poets, but he may be seen now and then on the fringes
of the circle, consulting with William Michael Rossetti about the
animal stretched at the feet of the Melancholia, with the result that
he alters
With the poor creature for dissection brought
into
With the keen wolf-hound sleeping undistraught.

It is characteristic of him that, understanding the Melancholia

better than Durer himself, he does not know whether it is a sheep
awaiting dissection or a wolf-hound that lies at her feet. He is con­
stantly the victim of ‘ education,’ without the peasant’s security or
the scholar’s. He has, intermittently, a great style of his own, sur­
passing Dante Gabriel Rossetti himself in the filling of lines with
sonorous Latinate polysyllabic phrases; he can set the walls of his
chapel of disbelief rocking with the reverberation of his tremendous
double rhymes; he can accumulate the symbols of disaster with
extraordinary resource so that when it seems impossible to add any­
thing which shall not diminish the total effect there shall indeed be
some dreadful gain,

As if blacker night could dawn on night

With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred.

But his only security is in monotony. The moment he escapes from

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The City of Dreadful Night to walk otherwise than in a circle, or

under changeful skies, his style becomes uncertain, a mixture of
Shelley, Heine, Browning and refined vulgarism.
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If he could have either acquired or escaped education! For

Thomson, in that trying, too-much-neglected part of his work which
celebrates Cockney gaieties, was attempting things very well worth
doing, of a real novelty. He really had divined that the choice is not
simply between the poetry of great passions and what James Hogg,
with an excellent contempt, called ‘ college poetry,’ but that there
remains the poetry of light impulses and caprices and casual ad­
ventures, and that poetry may come and go in an idle mind like a
tune and the muse be as the girl a young man picks up and loves for
Rochester’s ‘ livelong minute.’ For what he was trying to do in
‘ Sunday up the River ’ Thomson had every qualification except
ignorance or culture. Again and again he is within an inch of positive
success in that difficult enterprise, but some damnable half-know-
ledge of what is correct gets in the way, the laughter turns to
giggling, the sentiment to sentimentality. Not that there are no
achievements. Several of his slighter pieces have real Cockney
happiness; at least two sing exquisitely; but the poem that should
blend perfectly all that realism and light romance remains un­
written.
For all that, when we have done praising the sombre and majestic
City of Dreadful Night and the sometimes almost Keatsian Arabic
story, we should salute Thomson for his part in an attempt, begun
even more uncertainly by Leigh Hunt, continued in other ways by
Browning, culminating, perhaps, in the learned and perverse in­
valid’s amusement of Jules Laforgue, to make poetry modern. This,
too, is a part of Romanticism, the discovery of the romance of every­
day, though it may need a certain disillusionment with romance
for complete success in it.

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XIV

In considering the work of a group of artists who have been

thought of, and excusably, as given over to a languid luxury and to
the too deliberate accumulation of precious accessories, it is well to
emphasize, for their corrective value, those exceptional achievements
in which hand and soul have co-operated in the service of an austerer
ideal. And since it is eminently Rossetti who is liable to misunder­
standing, I will take his case. For the destruction of all the half-
truths about his painting I need only cite two of his successes,
‘ Arthur’s Tomb ’ and ‘ The Beloved.’
The small early water-colour shows us Rossetti at once at the
height of his energy and in fullest possession of the power of solving
an emotional problem strictly in the terms of the painter. There is
no question here of ‘ the crisis of a face.’ The tragedy of the situa­
tion of Lancelot and Guinevere, meeting by the wronged king’s
tomb, is not merely conveyed to us by its reflection in mournful
eyes, by the suggestion of the words that would come from lips that
have tasted forbidden fruit and learned to loathe its sweetness. Here
is no single figure within a symbolical setting. The thing is truly a
composition. That it is so small is a triumphant proof of Rossetti’s
genius. Into those few inches, with an art for once not inferior to
that which went to the making of the ‘ moment’s monument ’ of a
sonnet, and with far more vehemence than we find in any of the
sonnets, Rossetti has forced the crouching and menacing figure of
Lancelot, the uncloistered, drawn and recoiling figure of Guinevere,
the horizontal sculptured figure of Arthur, making the tacit com­
mentary which the dead make on the acts of the living; and then,
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with a magnificent stroke of designer’s genius, he has crushed them

down with the stiff, incumbent, stark bough of the tree. The picture
is, as it was resolutely intended to be, without relief. The eye yearns
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for the consolation of the perpendicular, and in vain. Here, indeed,

are those who are between the upper and the nether mill-stones;
here are, in truth, heads upon which the ends of the world are come.
It is a tortured picture: the one picture of Rossetti’s comparable
for intensity and ruthless compression with the poem by William
Morris, itself unique in the poet’s work. But my concern with it
here is to bring home to the reader the completeness of Rossetti’s
success in conveying the emotional tension through tension of
design where, going his more usual way, he might but have sug­
gested it through facial expression.
And now look at that other picture, one of the few of its period
for which the beautiful and abominable Fanny Schott was not his
model. For the most part ‘ The Beloved ’ is simply the typical
Rossetti picture, only done better than usual. But the left-centre of
the lower part of the canvas is filled with the likeness of a negro child
holding a vase of roses, and there, in that head, with its consum­
mate modelling, Rossetti for once is with the greatest masters. It is
true that the realism of that head makes war on the almost uncon­
toured, vaguely poetic face of the bride herself, and that for all its
wealth of colour and such incidental felicities as the success in
making us almost hear the singing of the two principal bridesmaids,
the whole is not quite satisfying. But if anyone thinks that Rossetti
could not paint the human animal with understanding alike of
osseous structure and of the pathos of the soul unconscious of its
cage, let him look at that negro child and learn the enormity of his
error.
Like every Puritan who is also an artist, Holman Hunt is con­
stantly being driven to compromises. He puzzled the Jew dealer
who commissioned ‘ The Scapegoat ’ : ‘ I wanted a nice religious
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bicture, and he has bainted me a great goat.’ But his intellectual

position is not a puzzle only because indefensible compromises be­
tween the desire of the eyes, the prime motive of painting, and an
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essentially unimaginative resolve to serve God directly, by denying

the half of what He has created, have been so common among us.
Blake can say with perfect composure that the nakedness of woman
and the pride of the peacock and the lust of the goat are parts of the
glory of God; it has to be a scapegoat before it is to Hunt’s purpose.
His ‘ Scapegoat ’ is a miracle. As Ford Madox Brown said of it at
the time when it was first shown, ‘ it requires to be seen to be be­
lieved in.’ ‘ Only then can it be believed how, by the might of
genius, out of an old goat and some saline incrustations, can be made
one of the most tragic and impressive works in the annals of art.’ At
the other extreme of Holman Hunt’s achievement is the thing on
which he worked for half'a century, ‘ The Lady of Shalott.’ The
picture is not so great as the original design for it. It is not great at
all; for it is the result neither of a grappling with earthly reality nor
of imaginative vision of unearthly reality, but the intricate and
opulent record of fancy, working on the level of Tennyson’s fancy.
The Puritan, unable to take romance perfectly earnestly, and con­
stitutionally incapable of frivolity, has ended in this solemn game
with the accessories of romance, the Rapunzel hair, the enchanted
mirror, and the rest. But it has its charm, or rather its separable
charms, and is not, despite the control of the beautiful original
design, so much a picture as a gallery in which we may see every
excellence, except the tragic, to which Holman Hunt could attain.
Since Holman Hunt in a candid and valuable book explained the
immediate origin of Pre-Raphaelitism, there is a danger that he
may be taken for an authority on its remoter origin. The break with
the past of English painting was not quite so sharp as he thought.
In his book, which does not lack pungency, he sums up the equa­
bility of Mulready as ‘ the equality of empty scales.’ The jibe is not
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Cleopatra
FREDERICK SANDYS
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without excuse. But can anyone tell me what essential difference

there is between the average early Pre-Raphaelite picture and such
a picture by Mulready as ‘ The Sonnet ’ ?
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I will quote Swinburne in honour of Frederick Sandys, who alone

among the English painters and draughtsmen of his time had full
command of tragedy:
Among the drawings [in the Academy of 1868] are two studies
by Mr Sandys, both worthy of the high place held by the artist.
One is a portrait full of force and distinction, drawn as perhaps no
other man among us can draw; the other, a woman’s face, is one of
his most solid and splendid designs; a woman of rich, ripe, angry
beauty, she draws one warm long lock of curling hair through her
full and moulded lips, biting it with bared bright teeth, which add
something of a tiger’s charm to the sleepy and couching passion of
her fair face. . . . Mr Sandys’ picture of ‘ Medea ’ is well enough
known by this time, wherever there is any serious knowledge of art,
to claim here some word of comment, not less seasonable than if it
were now put forward to grace the great show of the year. Like
Coriolanus, the painter might say if he would that it is his to
banish the judges, his to reject the ‘ common cry ’ of academics. For
this, beyond all doubt, is as yet his masterpiece. Pale as from poison,
with the blood drawn back from her very lips, agonized in face and
limbs with the labour and the fierce contention of old love with
new, of a daughter’s love with a bride’s, the fatal figure of Medea
pauses a little on the funereal verge of the wood of death, in act to
pour a blood-like liquid into the soft opal-coloured hollow of a
shell. The future is hard upon her, as a cup of bitter poison set close
to her mouth; the furies of Absyrtus, the furies of her children, rise
up against her from the unrisen years; her eyes are hungry and
helpless, full of a fierce and raging sorrow. Hard by her, henbane
and aconite and nightshade thrive and grow full of fruit and death;
before her fair feet the bright-eyed toads engender after their kind.
Upon the golden ground behind is wrought in allegoric decoration
the likeness of the ship Argo, with other emblems of the tragic
things of her life. The picture is grand alike for wealth of symbol
and solemnity of beauty.
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It was for a drawing by Sandys that Swinburne, almost im­

promptu, produced that minor masterpiece of decadent poetry,
‘ Cleopatra.’ George Meredith, then, as again at the close of life,
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cordial in admiration, but constitutionally disqualified for appre­

ciation of work in that temper, persuaded him that it was no more
than a farrago of the commonplaces of his poetical style, and Swin­
burne never reprinted it. Too relaxed in mood and too curiously
wrought in structure to rank with his very best work, hardly appro­
priate to the fundamentally dignified drawing, ‘ Cleopatra ’ is all
the same a thing of beauty and of a certain importance in the evo­
lution of decadent art. Beyond question it is the model for Oscar
Wilde’s poem, ‘ The Sphinx,’ and it gave some hint to Walter Pater
for the most famous, not the most characteristic, passage of his
prose, and it prepared an atmosphere for the men of the ’nineties.

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XV

That the Pre-Raphaelites and certain other admirable artists of

the period were rejected or very grudgingly acknowledged by the
Royal Academy is a story told and retold to weariness: the point
that has been missed is that the Academicians, eager for an art of
illustration, flouted the greatest illustrators of that age, the greatest
group of illustrators England has had in any one decade.
The wealth of noble or charming work done during the ’sixties,
mostly for quite popular periodicals or for books addressed to the
general public, is astonishing. Look at the Cornhill, at Once a Week,
at the Sunday Magazine, at Good Words, and at such books as
Willmott’s Sacred Poetry, 1862, and the Dalziel Arabian Nights!
The engravers, with the exception of W. J. Linton, a charming
small poet, an exceptional translator from the French, as well as a
master of engraving, are given to worsening or weakening the line,
and sometimes falsify the expression altogether. The Dalziel
brothers, one of them a good artist, all of them quick to discern
artistic merit, are very far from being irreproachable.
O woodman spare that block,
O gash not anyhow!
It took ten days by clock,
I’d fain protect it now.
Chorus— Wild laughter from Dalziel’s Workshop.

Thus Rossetti, who, however, set the engravers a sometimes almost

impossible task by employing ink, pencil, brush on the one intricate
drawing. On the whole, and despite an audacious personal method,
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invented in desperation with his first drawing on the wood, it was
Frederick Sandys who suffered most.
Millais was the king of these illustrators; and it is the Millais
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escaped from the original P.R.B., not yet degenerate; it is he— not
Menzel or any member of the P.R.B.— who is inspiration and exem­
plar to most of the illustrators of the period, to most of those who
matter. Those designs of his in the Parables of Our Lord, 1863,1 the
consummate Prodigal Son, the grim and never-to-be-forgotten
Tares, the beautifully composed Sower, with its defined rocky fore­
ground, are models of which no man with eyes and ambition could
be heedless. There is, even out of the wonderful decade, not much
that can reasonably be set on a level with the work of Millais as an
illustrator. How others would choose I do not know, but for my
part if called upon to match the greatest of the Millais Parable
drawings on their own ground, I should without hesitation pick
Ford Madox Brown’s magnificent ‘ Elijah and the Widow’s Son ’
out of the much later published Bible Gallery of the Dalziels. With
perfect plausibility, the illustration is designed step-wise, descend­
ing from the top right-hand corner; above and to the extreme right
there is the figure of the prophet, charged with character as no other
man in that generation could have charged him, and immediately
below, held forth by the prophet, is the boy, and then, at precisely
the interval desired by the eye, there is the kneeling figure of the
widow. The interest is concentrated where it should be, but balance
is secured by the treatment.
Probably, however, if there is to be anyone set up against Millais
the illustrator by virtue of his work as a whole that man must be
A. Boyd Houghton. Certain of his paintings, particularly one of a
group of Volunteers in the early days of that movement, have points
of likeness to some of the paintings of Ford Madox Brown; have, at
any rate, some of the same honesty, the same willingness to accept
1 Commonly dated 1864, but actually issued in 1863.
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MILLAIS
St Agnes’ Eve
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a comic element in the material. In the drawings done by Boyd

Houghton for the periodicals of the ’sixties, for the Dalziels’ Arabian
Nights, 1863-5, and f°r Don Quixote, what was impatient and sar­
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donic in the man becomes evident enough. Swift and summarizing,

he gets on to his block with an unusual economy the results of an
observation that has captured the characteristic thing and passed by
everything else. Nearly all the drawings of Oriental subjects show
an unparaded observation of things commonly missed. Boyd
Houghton knows, for instance, that people who have gone bare­
footed all their days walk otherwise than those who have taken off
their shoes in the studio, and there is a drawing of his, an Eastern
ploughman seen from behind at the moment of checking his cattle,
in which there is almost as much science in the drawing of the small
of the back and the buttocks as Degas put into a ballet-girl straining
at the bar. Outside the books, he seldom did anything better than
two early drawings in the Sunday Magazine, ‘ John Baptist ’ and
‘ The Parable of the Sower ’ ; for the best of his more elaborate work
one must look at the design in the British Museum of ‘ Reading the
Chronicles,’ which has his customary energy and sense of character,
with a special skill in the grouping of the figures about the regal,
reclining listener and the crouched, expository reader.
For all the great qualities of the Millais and Madox Brown and
Boyd Houghton drawings, I for one would rather possess a complete
set of the Frederick Sandys than a complete set of any other of these
masters of illustration. Sandys was limited, in range and in the
quantity of his production: a great reputation rests on less than
thirty designs, in which three or four emotional motifs are repeated.
All those designs were done in less than fifteen years, and then, the
heat he caught from Rossetti dying out of him, he became cold.
What there is to show for the last decades of a long life no one need
trouble to enquire, though dignity and a precise draughtsmanship,
his birthright and his acquisition, he preserved to the end. But in
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several of his drawings, as in all his major paintings, there is a

grandeur more natural than that of any contemporary. It is Watts
who is the typical grand artist of the Victorian period; and, with his
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consciousness of being the heir of all the artistic ages, his choice of
noble or at any rate distinguished subjects, his grave approach, he
has nobility, sometimes only of intention, often purchased at a
cost to sheer painting and draughtsmanship. Capable, as he proved
often enough, of painting the sitter as he is and yet educing great­
ness, he will evade the challenge to a certainly not inadequate tech­
nique in a lofty refusal of what he has come to think a trivial par­
ticularity; and, as regards a woman’s dress, determined that it shall
not date, will generalize it into a meaningless cloak of nudity. But
Frederick Sandys, so much smaller and more limited an artist, in his
brief best period had a native nobility, not of intention but of spirit,
that comes through to us in almost every one of his designs. It is
perfectly naturally that he turns to Greek tragic legend and Norse
sagas for subjects; the heroic is his element.
The engravers damaged almost every one of the thirteen drawings
he did for Once a Week. The very beautiful ‘ Amor Mundi,’ done
in 1865 as an illustration for Christina Rossetti’s poem in Cassell’s
Shilling Magazine, was yet more beautiful in the original. He himself
said that the4Danae,’ in the Hobby-Horse in 1888, was the first satis­
factory engraving he had had; it is a good engraving, but see what
has been done to the shadow on the upper lip! 4Proud Maisie,’ too
great a thing for the poem, though that is the one authentic poem
written by Sir Walter Scott, survived each of the several treatments
it received; of that and the4Morgan le Fay,’ in the British Architect,
1879, it may safely be said that we have them as they should be for
the simple reason that even Sandys could not have conceived them
more greatly, executed them more nobly.
Sandys, who did more than one drawing for Swinburne during
the few years of their friendship, should have been employed to
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illustrate Atalanta in Calydon and then the northern narrative

poetry of William Morris. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the natural
illustrator of his own poetry and of some of Christina’s, and one of
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his drawings for her ‘ You Should Have Wept Her Yesterday,’ in
The Prince's Progress, 1866, is a most subtly beautiful and faithful
translation into design of her verse. But for the slighter and blither
part of her poetry, for those minute and delightful poems in which
she is richer even than Herrick, there was but one man, Arthur
Hughes, who collaborated with her so happily in ‘ Speaking
Likenesses.’ In his drawings for William Allingham, whose verse
was so fortunate with Rossetti and Hughes as illustrators; in such
drawings for periodicals as ‘ Sun Comes, Moon Comes,’ done for
Good Words, in 1871; in the delicious painting of * April Love,’ full
of tender hesitation, full of the spirit of girlhood, a beautiful nature
is seen expressing itself. In the Tom Brozvn illustrations, done for a
namesake who was no relation, there is inevitably a descent into the
robust commonplaces of the subject. The truth about Hughes is
that he was in his own modest way one of ‘ Love’s lovers.’ Others in
that generation, Rossetti especially, brought Love the gifts of the
Magi, were celebrants of the mysteries of sacred and profane pas­
sion ; Hughes came at dawn or twilight with the simplest offerings
and to an innocent, unritualled worship. At a time when they made
books like Willmott’s Sacred Poetry, a horrid book if it were not for
some of the contents and such drawings as those by Sandys, they
should have made, with more simplicity, an anthology of love lyrics
for Hughes to illustrate. Actually, he had the illustrating of Enoch
Arden, of which we may say what Luttrell said of the Italy of
Rogers, that ‘ it would have been dished but for the plates.’

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XVI

As regards poetry, the new men who mattered were followers of

Rossetti and his closest associates: as regards painting, the best of
the secondary, mostly younger, men were influenced by the
earlier, the more strictly Pre-Raphaelite work, rather than by the
mature Rossetti and by Burne-Jones. It must be possible, since it
has been done, to write about Strudwick and Byam Shaw, but not
for m e; I can but apologize for my incapacity, and throw back to
those others, several of them strongly affected by Millais. And here
it becomes necessary to say more of Millais himself. What he
was for a little while, in contact with Hunt and Rossetti and Madox
Brown, is matter for a proud page in the history of English painting
and illustration. Almost the last of the old Millais, with much of the
best of what the new was to be, is in the sketches he made during
his Scottish tour with the Ruskins, an episode ending with the
transformation of Mrs Ruskin into Mrs Millais. The marriage was
announced in the Leader, July 7th, 1855, under the heading
‘ Deaths ’ : not on account of the marriage, it was virtually the death
of the great artist, the birth of the salmon-fishing, hearty Philistine.
That poetry went out of Millais is a commonplace, but seldom
has it been indicated quite how. The affair, it seems to me, was not
simply one of pot-boiling. The radical trouble with the new Millais
was that he began to provide prosaic, circumstantial justification for
the presence and the occupations of the people in his pictures. Now
with great painters the figure, the poise and gesture, the accessories,
the background, need no rational explanation of their coming to­
gether within the frame. Monna Lisa in that strange landscape, the
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Melancholia amidst that * strange alliance ’ of properties, or that

tailor at his workaday task, all offer us, for immediate acceptance
and complete satisfaction, an inexplicable inner harmony between
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the figure and its setting. Millais himself has done it, in * Autumn
Leaves,’ where there is no thought of telling us why the figures are
occupied as they are, only a profound lyrical impulse to render the
mystery of a simple, infinitely significant action in the setting it
makes for itself. But that other Millais! The fireman is on the
seventeenth rung of the ladder, or the doctor by the bedside, or the
nuns are posed with practicable shovels by the grave, because, you
see . . . They can account for their presence and their precise
doings, at the moment at which he has accosted them, as glibly and
in as matter-of-fact a way as the accused at the police-court, and
might be put in the background in plan, with exhibits A and B
and C. Millais has forgotten that the body of man possessing the
body of woman, a mother’s arm going round her child, a sower’s
gesture as he scatters seed, are more than movements to satisfy a
particular moment’s lust, to mitigate a child’s momentary fear, to
ensure a crop in the five-acre field; that they are things eternally
significant, parts of a rhythm that began before the individual life
and will persist after it, and that it is an abominable triviality to
relate the movement only to its immediate excuse.

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XVII

S o m e t h i n g of the earlier and incomparably nobler Millais, or of

Holman Hunt, or of Ford Madox Brown is to be discerned in the
work of most of those whom I now take without much concern for
the order of their appearance. The precision of John Brett, as
he goes about the difficult business of extending the early Pre-
Raphaelite method to landscape, may not mean very much to us.
‘ The Stone Breaker ’ has some unpleasant chalkiness of colour in
parts, though the cliffs in the background compensate for that, and
would for almost anything. The more frequently cited landscape
by him seems in my memory of it a thing done from without, in a
serious but unimpassioned challenge to a skill that is three parts
patience. But look at the ‘ Lady with a Dove,’ in the T ate! It is in
all respects a small thing, and I do not know that one would care to
see a dozen things of the sort in any one gallery. But the minute
finish has, for once, a purely artistic justification, not merely the
mostly irrelevant and moral excuse offered by Holman Hunt; finish
of that sort, if you will consider the little picture carefully, was
dictated by the scale of the thing, by the firm and daintily chiselled
profile of the Lady, by the perching dove; and with how grave a
happiness, almost as of a masterpiece by Whistler, though without
any suggestion of his way with the brush, have the grey and the
beautiful black of the dress come together!
Two other workers in detail at once justify themselves. Martin-
eau’s ‘ The Last Day in the Old Home ’ extorts from detail, without
effort, all that it can yield of the emotion proper to his subject, and
the apparent prose domesticity of the picture should not blind any­
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one to the imagination in the chief figure to the right, the excellently
observed spendthrift, elegant, anxious, discovering, as his kind will,
a hope for the better day as he raises his glass, or to the unobtrusive
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pathos of his little son imitating the father. A faint suggestion of

wax-work diminishes the pleasure given by the ‘ Chatterton ’ of
Henry Wallis, with its logical, rather too logical, accumulation of
accessories, without enough hint of the indifferent movement of a life
that will go on though poet-forgers kill themselves in garrets. The
hair, where the light falls on it, and the wrinkled rug beneath the
corpse, are the work of a hand that had felt textures.
Others perhaps not more remote from the earlier Pre-Raphaelite
ideals might be brought into the discussion, but I pass to some more
obviously related to the group of the ’fifties. W. S. Burton’s
‘ Wounded Cavalier,’ for work done at twenty-six, has an assurance
in dealing with detail truly remarkable; and Charles Alston Collins,
Wilkie’s brother, in *Convent Thoughts,’ announced an artist who,
with persistence and the likely enough discovery that the human
body is flexible, would have mattered. The ‘ Burd Helen ’ of W. L.
Windus, showed, among other merits, a rare feeling for the type of
face requisite for the conveyance of his matter, the heartless lover
being an inspired, surprising, at once convincing, piece of casting
for a part which with most other painters would have been filled so
very differently. But it is ‘ Too Late,’ with the consummately ren­
dered face of the consumption-stricken girl and the admirable gawk
of a younger sister gazing up, in an incomplete comprehension of
tragedy, at the man who covers his face, that is his masterpiece.
Seen in a catalogue, the title would be a warning; but there was
never a picture of the sort that less needed a title.
Whether anyone has reckoned in George Wilson in numbering
the host of those who took some tinge from the Pre-Raphaelites, I
do not remember. If he belongs to them, it is only in spirit, and
perhaps not altogether in spirit even, for he went to Shelley where
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they went to Keats. It is in his picture of a very Shelley-like poet

making his bewildered way through the thorny labyrinth of life
that he comes nearest to achievement. There is, however, a great
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gulf between such gracious, derivative symbolism and the energetic,

original symbolism, at one glorious moment barely inferior to
Blake’s, which bodies forth the ideas of Nettleship. He took up
eventually with alcohol and lions, getting, one must hope, some
comfort out of each as a man, but getting out of neither as an artist
the violence of the subject. A drunkard’s picture by Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec, and Ward’s not quite sane fight between a snake
and a tiger, put that Nettleship in his unimportant place. The other,
the author of the superb ‘ Jacob Wrestling with the Angel,’ Jacob
held in the hollow of the Angel’s hand, is a master, doing a tre­
mendous thing with an unfaltering energy; and there is reason
to believe, with the dubiously reported eulogies of Rossetti and
Browning ringing in our ears, that the lost design of * God Creating
Evil,’ a woman and a tiger issuing from the Creator’s forehead, was
the sublimest thing done since Blake. There is something more to
Nettleship’s account, that strange ‘ Head of Minos.’ ‘ I would do
my contours in iron, if I could,’ said Gericault, expressing the
ideal of a certain kind of painting. Well, here is drawing in iron. I
cannot praise it. I can only refer the reader to a passage written by
Swinburne, long before and without the least thought of Nettleship,
in eulogy of the great French tragedies of George Chapman: a
passage in which he sees stamped on those tragedies a single, super­
human face, implacable and terrific.

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XVIII

did drawings, all of a certain imaginative power but

N e t t l e s h ip
mostly unpleasing in line, for The Epic of Women, O’Shaughnessy’s
first volume of verse, which was published in the same year as
Rossetti’s Poems. When, four years later, there appeared Music and
Moonlight, O’Shaughnessy’s work was done. He had had but little
to express, and from the first he has made it plain both that he was
derivative and that there was in his genius, for he had genius, a
flaw such as might be expected in one who had Irish blood in him
and was the son of Bulwer-Lytton. Something of Moore, faintly
perceptible in even so good a poem as ‘ The Fountain of Tears,’
and something tricky, which has been referred to Poe but is
explicable in terms of Bulwer-Lytton, may be found in all his
weaker work. But he had his inspirations, from the grave
and from a nostalgia of some faintly remembered life before
birth.
Des voluptes interieures
Le sourire mysterieux!

He has that attraction for us which is exercised most commonly in

life by the reminiscent smile of a woman, usually a quite empty-
minded woman, who is recalling, not the subtle experiences with
which our sensual imagination credits her, but trivialities. He has
the advantage over her, inevitably, for in art there is no luck of
features, that he really is remembering an exquisite thing, really is
listening to a secret song.
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But all the while within I hear

A song I do not sing for fear—
How sweet, how different a thing!
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A poet for anthologists, he was nearly or quite ruined by the too

enthusiastic Palgrave, and others have given us with a unanimity
that is wearisome the best part of * We are the Music-Makers ’ and
‘ The Fountain of Tears.’ They ought to give us ‘ Bisclaveret,’
which in its treatment of the werewolf theme adds energy to his
customary merits, and ‘ There is an earthly glimmer in the tomb,’
the last lines of which have a security of style rare indeed in this
improvising poet.

While Memory, in some soft low monotone,

Is pouring like an oil into mine ear
The tale of a most short and hollow bliss,
That I once throbbed, indeed, to call my own,
Holding it hardly between joy and fear,—
And how that broke, and how it came to this.

Philip Bourke Marston, allied to O ’Shaughnessy, even more

dependent on Rossetti and Swinburne, even more monotonous,
was too fortunate in one way, too unfortunate in every other, to
approach the success certainly within reach of his talent. The de­
scendant of Marston, the Elizabethan, the son of Westland Marston,
having ‘ Festus ’ Bailey as godfather and Mrs Craik as godmother,
almost adopted by Swinburne from the age of fourteen, he had
‘ advantages ’ perilous to a nature not disposed to go its own way.
For the rest, with partial blindness from the age of three, and total
blindness from twenty, and with an almost unparalleled series of
bereavements in his short life, he was far too much driven in on
himself. It is impossible to read his many sonnets without sympathy
with the man and respect for the craftsman, but in following Rossetti
he forgot Rossetti’s demand for ‘ fundamental brainwork ’ ; and
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when, most successfully in ‘ The Old Churchyard of Bonchurch,’

he followed Swinburne he forgot that the slightest check in such a
metre will be a jolt. But he was himself in writing
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I put my flower of song into thy hand,

And turn my eyes away,—
It is a flower from a most desolate land,
Barren of sun and day,
Even this life of mine.
As two who meet upon a foreign strand,
’Twas mine with thee to stray,—
I put this flower of song into thy hand
And turn my eyes away,
And look where no lights shine . . .

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XIX

the most unfortunate in respect of

R ic h a r d W a t s o n D ix o n ,
recognition of the original Morris group, went unillustrated for all
that his earlier work contains many invitations to the illustrator.
‘ St Mary Magdalene ’ reads like a poem made for a design by
Rossetti. In other pieces there is such matter as this:

Row ranged on row they came; the light of love

Burned softly in their eyes, row ranged on row
Of men in heavenly panoply, a grove
Of violet plumes and lifted swords; below
And through, ’twixt arm and shoulder, and between
Plumed helm and helm, wild eyes and golden hair
And passionate lips; with throngings here and there.

With something of Keats’s pictorial gift, he has at times the very

note of Keats, as in the beautiful ode ‘ To Summer ’ :

Yet thou must fall, sweet nurse of budded boughs.

There are the other odes, * The Fall of the Leaf,’ ‘ The Spirit
Wooed,’ the ‘ Ode on Advancing Age,’ poems of a grave passion
unrecognized in their own period and far too little recognized even
to-day. There are certain lyrics, especially ‘ The Feathers of the
Willow ’ with its wealth of autumnal symbols. And there is ‘ Mano,’
too complicated in plot, but full of beautiful things, and a triumph
of virtuosity in the use of terza rima.
His friend, Mr Robert Bridges, writing of the romantic quality
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of strangeness common to Blake and William Morris, has asked us

to note how with Blake the strangeness falls to a subordinate rank,
in service to a wider imagination and a more spiritual purpose, and
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has declared Dixon to be in this regard with Blake rather than

Morris. A single brief lyric of Dixon’s gives us almost all of Blake-
like imagination that there was in him.

Silent fell the rain

To the earthly ground;
Then arose a sound
To complain.

The epithet ‘ earthly ’ there; the wintered bird ‘ in his bewildered

bower ’ ; the ‘ drifted ’ ring of the fallen leaves: Dixon is full of
these unobtrusive felicities in poems which, written after he had
emerged from Pre-Raphaelitism, may seem rather bare and flat at
a first glance. With him the romantic impulse has been disciplined,
by scholarship, by spiritual authority. He was the author of a great
and disgracefully neglected history of the Church of England; his
is an Anglican poetry, a poetry of spiritual romance poised between
the Puritanism of Holman Hunt and the pagan Catholicism ac­
cepted, for purposes of art, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

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XX

T he painters of the period worked in an atmosphere charged with

the influences, and I use the plural advisedly, of Ruskin; and
Rossetti, over and above what each member of the Pre-Raphaelite
group owed to the empassioned preacher of sound and false doctrine,
was for certain years under a heavy direct obligation.
I do not see how any critic can give us the complete truth about
Ruskin. There are few things to be said by wisdom or folly about
art which Ruskin did not somewhere say; and with equal plausi­
bility and wealth of documentation he may be presented as the
possessor of an almost unrivalled insight into new principles of
painting and as a brutally bigoted amateur. Holman Hunt, I take
it, understood Ruskin not much more than did the average in­
telligent reader of the period, and certainly the doctrine of mere
reproduction would have been so congenial to Hunt the theorist,
a smaller man than the artist, that the wiser message of Ruskin
would have had little chance with him. But Ruskin, it is amusing
to reflect, could declare the independence of painting in terms as
uncompromising as those used by Whistler.
The most notable pronouncement, I suppose, but the brevity
of life precludes the searching of the whole of Ruskin, is that, in
the Stones of Venice, in which he says:

We are to remember, in the first place, that the arrangement of

colours and tones is an art analogous to the composition of music,
and entirely independent of the representation of facts.
We are far enough from the original theory of Pre-Raphaelitism
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H O LM A N H U N T
The Lady of Shalott
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there! Far also from the teaching of Ruskin himself on many other
pages. In reading him it is almost always necessary to allow for the
occasion, the particular audience, the mood or malady of an often
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petulant and sometimes deranged writer. How far the Pre-Raphael­

ites made the requisite allowances is hard to discover. They had
him not as we have him, but in course of agitated development.
He had begun to write art criticism, or magniloquent discourses
on the nature of things with somewhat hastily chosen pictures as
pretexts, long before Pre-Raphaelitism began, and before he himself
knew quite whither he was tending. Much of his work was too
propagandist or too much to some special occasion to allow of
clear exposure of his whole position. And, in the main, he was a
stimulant rather than a guide. But, his writings apart, simply as a
private counsellor, he was for a while of great benefit to Rossetti.
One knows not how much to credit to Ruskin’s wisdom, how
much to his luck: there is evidence enough that his understanding
of Rossetti was at certain times seriously at fault, and the final
attempt of the smaller man to brow-beat the greater was painfully
comic. Yet, for a while, Ruskin did Rossetti the great service of
keeping him to the small things painted out of the inner heat of
imagination when clients were tempting Rossetti to do single
female heads out of his dreamy sensuality.
In the end, there was misunderstanding, not all of it the mis­
understanding of hostility. We can but smile unhappily when the
infinitely amiable Burne-Jones is a witness for Ruskin, defendant,
against Whistler. No doubt Whistler took his liberties with Nature,
but before he began to paint; the brush once in his hand, for the
rendering of the fastidiously selected aspect of her, he had scruples
more delicate than any known to Ruskin. And it was absurdly that
the author of the words I have quoted from Ruskin,‘ an art analogous
to the composition of music,’ clashed with the painter who went to
music for the titles of his harmonies and symphonies; absurdly
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that Burne-Jones supported the Ruskin of caprice against the

Ruskin who was a sage, and against Whistler. There need never
have been a quarrel; I am sure, after study of the unedited docu­
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ments, that if chance had not frustrated Swinburne’s earlier effort

to get Ruskin to Whistler’s studio, there never would have been
one. But Ruskin could not, in any event, have been continuously
sympathetic even where Rossetti was concerned. In all his generosity
in other ways, he wished to have not God’s Rossetti but Ruskin’s.
He was right about Rossetti for a while, preferring the little
watercolours in which imagination rules to the luxuriously fanciful
works in which, sometimes, Rossetti seems less to be rendering a
subject than providing patrons with a typical Rossetti, instantly
recognizable as such. For that while, he knew Rossetti better than
Rossetti knew himself, but he was the smaller man of the two. It
may sound blasphemous to say so; yet in art, in a final judgment,
the immense range, the feverish, high-motived enthusiasm, the
inexhaustible eloquence of a Ruskin count for little. They made
him, after Carlyle, the chief influence of his age. But all that matters
ultimately in art is the thing done in the faultless co-operation of
hand and soul, not preachment, with whatever gift of tongues,
about the aims of doing or the conditions of achievement.
There were very few in that period who were capable of full
achievement. Indeed, though there were greater writers than these
it sometimes seems to me that only Rossetti and Pater and Coventry
Patmore, in their finest work, had that power of perfect adequacy,
the effect with Pater, however, being often of an exact mosaic rather
than of a beautiful thing cast, by a single act, as a whole. But all
Rossetti’s associates contributed to the new ideal of artistic per­
fection, of a purified and self-sufficing beauty; all had that vision
which was Coleridge’s when he wrote:
She, she herself, and only she,
Shone through her body visibly.
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Beauty herself, inutile, disengaged from all the moral and social
conditions of her acceptance by Ruskin or by the apostate Tenny­
son of ‘ The Palace of Art,’ has had no such service from a group
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since then. If it was not in Ruskin so to serve her, at least he made

all England aware of the religion of beauty.

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XXI

V ic t o r ia nRomanticism by, or soon after, 1870 is condemned to

death, but with an ‘ indefinite reprieve ’ which proved to be long.
Rossetti has hardly come completely before the general body of
readers as a poet, Swinburne has hardly reached his highest lyrical
achievement in the ardent and purified Songs Before Sunrise, when
the period of decline begins.
I say decline, rather than decadence, because the latter word has
too many meanings, some of which cannot be read into the decline
till the ’nineties. What we see at the close of the epoch covered by
this volume, as regards poetry, is first a thinning of the substance.
In Marston, and still more in O ’Shaughnessy, poetry becomes
tenuous not so much through spiritualization as through lack of
blood. A certain amount of Pre-Raphaelite colour is retained;
there is a good deal that is superficially Rossettian and Swinburnian;
but there is very seldom any of that ‘ fundamental brainwork,’
that ‘ mental cartooning ’ on which Rossetti insisted, and there is
none of the energy, none of the humane enthusiasm of Swinburne.
We discern the symptoms of an often graceful enough decline,
with the establishment of a diction slightly too poetic to be the
vehicle of the finest poetry. We see a process of thinning and
weakening, but hardly any perversion. When perversion does appear
it is, as it nearly always will be, first of all in technique, questions of
technique being, though few can see or care to admit as much,
absolutely fundamental. Hopkins, isolated except for the sympathy
of Richard Watson Dixon, and later of Mr Robert Bridges, sets out
in heroic and hopeless, yet after all not unrewarded, search of some­
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thing not unlike that which Stephane Mallarme sought. He destroys

the natural order of words, wrenches syntax, flouts punctuation in
an endeavour to secure a coincidence between emotional, logical
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and metrical emphasis which can be attained, if at all, only for a few
lines at a time. It is inadequate to say that he will speak only the
language of incantations; he wishes to get out of words not a spell
which shall cause the rose to blossom or the bird to fly on his page,
but, instantaneously, petals where the type has been imposed, the
very swoop of wings in the lines. In equal isolation, with less skill
and less hazardous ambition, James Thomson, in his slighter work,
is trying to be modern, to be casual, the poet of whims and lucky
encounters and undignified entertainments. Later there will be
Henley, whose significance as a link between the faintly Pre-
Raphaelite or ‘ aesthetic ’ bric-a-brac group, the experimentalists,
the realists and the decadents has never yet been fully acknowledged,
Meanwhile there will be the group of which I have just spoken
as dealing in bric-a-brac, though each of its members had solider
and more gravely wrought wares to offer. Dobson and Lang keep a
tinge of Pre-Raphaelite colour; they go to France, not exactly in
company with Swinburne, but on his hint; they follow up Swin­
burne’s endeavour to use the fixed French forms; and they dis­
creetly anticipate some later writers in their readiness to be occa­
sional. With rarer gifts than are usually allowed them, both Dobson
and Lang have a shrinking from the primary emotions, recoiling
from the indelicacy of frank avowals, smiling away their emotions.
Lang pays the full penalty of such timidity; his serious verse con­
tinually suffers from his refusal to recognize the real quality of his
feeling. With Dobson the evasion results, at times, in a peculiar
ironical pathos, strictly comparable with Watteau’s, a pathos which
is not in the words of Dobson’s verse but without a perception of
which he could not have written them. He goes to the eighteenth
century to be, in his own shy way, very modem, and is well aware
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of the menace of a reality against the intrusion of which he erects

such frail, gay defences.
The real decadence is delayed by this dexterous and innocent
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interlude, and by general realization that Tennyson, the alarms and

excursions of the ’sixties and ’seventies being over, has reasserted
his authority. But it is coming. The influences introduced by Swin­
burne, Baudelaire’s, Gautier’s influence, the suggestive criticism of
Walter Pater, the pictures and paradoxes of Whistler, the attitudes
of Oscar Wilde are having their effect. Henley, who is an art critic
as well as a poet, both encourages and disguises the tendency. He is
pathologically personal, in the sense of the phrase from Balzac
which he prefixes to his hospital poems, and he is breaking up the
larger poetic instruments in favour of an etcher’s needle with which
the strangest and most fugitive aspects of reality shall be noted.
But he is also a bellowing, genial ruffian, easily taken for one of your
hearty great fellows; and he will seem to go arm-in-arm with Mr
Rudyard Kipling. They know better at the Cafe Royal, at the
Rhymers’ Club, in Vigo Street, and in the office of the enterprising
and obscenity-loving Leonard Smithers. Oscar Wilde writes the
best review of Henley’s first volume of verse; Mr Arthur Symons
writes the most discriminatingly enthusiastic estimate of Henley’s
verse as a whole, finding in it modernity becoming in a sense classical.
But it is an artist in line or paint that the period needs, its Rossetti:
it finds two, Aubrey Beardsley, so eclectic that he seems to make
himself equally out of Burne-Jones, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Japanese
prints, Greek vase designs and contemporary French posters; and
Charles Conder. And Victorian Romanticism ends in a distinguished
perversity, in a kind of languid fete galante, as of that earlier Dob­
sonian entertainment grown complicated, ambiguous, here and
there corrupt. It preserves some attitudes and costumes from the
Rossetti period, it has some properties from Whistler, it has taken
fans from Austin Dobson and masks from the earlier Verlaine and
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borrowed frippery in bulk from France, but its atmosphere, with

that ‘ forgotten censer ’ of Baudelaire perfuming it secretly, is its
own. Qualis artifex! Victorian Romanticism is acutely aware that
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its end is at hand, and to be met in the spirit of the artist. Fin de
siecle is murmured everywhere. All the books have been read, all
the forbidden fruit eaten, and there is no need of Mallarme to ex­
plain that the flesh is sad. But the final entertainment, religious in a
way, has its carefully respected ritual. A great energy has been ex­
hausted ; there remain these rites, performed, for a change welcome
to the weary epicures of sensation, a rebours. But the service of the
Devil demands at least as much energy as the service of God, and
only Beardsley seems to have known that truth.
The great outburst of Romanticism in France was followed by a
reaction in which men attempted to reproduce the contemporary
world, building, as the classic phrase has it, with bricks and mortar
between the covers of a book, painting on no pretext from Byron
or another poet, but with their eyes on the sobriety of nature and on
the accidents of the human comedy. Nothing of the sort followed
in England the suicide of Romanticism. How could it? Life had
become, by then, too complicated, too full of things existing in
satisfaction not of a universal and permanent demand, but of a
transient requirement of a sophisticated society invaded by refined
vulgarians. Realism, which even in France began to acknowledge
its defeat when with Zola it took life in sections labelled ‘ Money,’
‘ Fertility,’ or what not, instead of with the comprehensiveness of
Balzac, was out of the question: contemporary life is too much for
the writer who wishes neither to take it sectionally nor to hold a
mirror to its general confusion. Realism is a phase, possible only for
a period in which material things have begun to matter very greatly,
but in which life is still co-ordinated and fairly simple. The future
is with an expanded and courageous Romanticism, and in the in­
evitable revival the Victorian Romantics will once more have due
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attention. Since they, with the exception of Morris, were specialists

in imaginative experience, they may not mean as much to us as
Blake and Coleridge and Shelley; but since they were more con­
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scious of their ideals and more concentrated, they will have for us
a peculiar value.

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XXII

C o n s id e r some of the ideas of Rossetti, whose every pronounce­

ment has a peculiar note of authority. ‘ No imaginative artist,’ he
tells us, ‘ can fully express his own tone of mind without sometimes
in his life working untrammelled by present reference to nature.’
But, he goes on, ‘ it is equally or still more imperative that im­
mediate study of nature should pervade the whole completed work.’
And then, sharply dissociating himself from Holman Hunt’s
practice and Ruskin’s theory, by which, in its extremest and most
commonly quoted form,1 painters are to go to nature and repro­
duce it, ‘rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing,’
he says finely:

Tenderness, the constant unison of wonder and familiarity so

mysteriously allied in nature, the sense of fullness and abundance
such as we feel in a field, not because we pry into it all, but because
it is all there: these are the inestimable prizes to be secured only
by such study (of nature) in the painter’s every picture.

It is a very definite parting of company with Holman Hunt, who

would take an inventory of God’s plenty where Rossetti bids us
refrain from prying into it all.

1 It should always be remembered, however, as it scarcely ever is, that this is

Ruskin’s caricature of his own teaching, excusable only because addressed to artists
in the making. His true position is indicated, in a passage already quoted in The Stones
of Venice. Ruskin’s teaching ought, indeed, invariably to be studied with reference
to the occasion of its delivery, and with reference to all his other pronouncements on
the matter under discussion. But he has himself to blame if it is misunderstood.
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What Rossetti thought of some contemporary painters and

draughtsmen may be gathered from the passages he contributed
to art criticisms by his brother; but it is more to our purpose to
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note his attitude towards two artists who in some ways link the
work of Rossetti and his fellows to that of William Blake. Quite
what he made of David Scott is not to be discovered. In the pages
he wrote for Gilchrist’s biography of Blake, Rossetti said that,
despite claims rightly made for Etty and Maclise, ‘ David Scott
will one day be acknowledged as the painter most nearly fulfilling
the highest requirements for historic art, both as a thinker and a
colourist,’ since Hogarth. At times, however, Rossetti seems to
have been perceptive enough of the defects and weaknesses of
David Scott, and inclined to make jest of even those qualities by
which he is in some sort of the tribe of Blake. About Samuel
Palmer he had no doubt: ‘ Such a manifestation of spiritual
force absolutely present— though not isolated as in Blake— has
certainly never been united with native landscape-power in the
same degree.’
But in regard to painting Rossetti very rarely reduced to precise
statement the ideals he cherished; in regard to poetry he did so
seldom, yet came much less short of covering the ground. His
insistence on ‘ fundamental brainwork,’ on ‘ mental cartooning,’
his requirement that poetry should be as ‘ amusing ’ as any other
form of imaginative literature, that other requirement according
to which * poetry should seem to the hearer to have been always
present to his thought, but never before heard ’ : these are utter­
ances to be valued with Coleridge’s, with those of Keats. I have
already quoted that fundamental thing about poetry which he
wrote to William Allingham. His criticism of poetry was entirely
a poet’s, which is why he estimated more highly than any but a
poet will the poetry of Chatterton, of Wells, of Ebenezer Jones,
of Hake, recognizing in immature or frustrate work an energy
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

which had need to produce more definite results for recognition

by ordinary criticism. The pressing of the claims of exceptional
art was congenial work for the whole group.
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Rossetti, however pungent and stimulating his occasional re­

marks on painters and poets, did not anywhere bring to a head the
dispute of his group with prevalent doctrine. That was done by
Swinburne, who, with his personal message certainly, was in early
years a voice for the group.
In 1858 Swinburne wrote a fragment of an essay on ‘ The Pro­
gress of Art in Modern Times,’ which has not been published, and
from the manuscript of which, in Mr Wise’s collection, I quote
some of the more significant sentences:

In most studies which have occupied men’s attention there is a

time of change, and a time of return to the elder models; men
discover that those who were the first to introduce alteration were
no nearer than their predecessors to judicial infallibility, and some­
times, in the reaction from one tone of thought or feeling, adopt
too hastily the form which it originally superseded, or such a sub­
stitute as their own times may best be able to afford. In painting,
as in other arts, this has been of late years the case, but among
ourselves it has assumed a very different form from that which it
had many years ago. . . . We do not, it is said, look upon art in
the light in which its earliest apostles beheld it. Imitation, there­
fore, of the effects, when their causes are no more, can, if at all
feasible, reproduce only a lifeless and servile copy, or a mannered
caricature. To such men as Angelico, art and religion were indeed
one; to call them indivisible was no mere form of words. Now this
tone of mind we cannot re-attain; however desirable some may
think it would be, we cannot transplant medieval feeling into the
atmosphere of our daily life and work; we cannot reproduce it in
painting or in writing, but only a dead unreal mockery of its out­
ward tone.
This argument seems not very difficult to answer. Those who
desire us to emulate the noblest models do not bid us sit down
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and copy them line by line. . . . Imitation, to be worth much,

must begin from within and not from without. . . . The artist
indeed must recur always to the same source of inspiration— not
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to any classical model ready made to order. It seems strange that

a truism like this should at any time become a truth practically
unrecognized; yet so it has been. Eyes long accustomed to consider
the false and the factitious, real and faithful, looked upon genuine
and beautiful truth, when it came before them, as unreal and
absurd.

I interrupt quotation from Swinburne’s boyish essay to recall

that among such eyes were those not only of most of the accredited
art critics of the period but of his adored Charles Dickens. If The
Times described * Christ in the House of His Parents ’ as ‘ dis­
gusting,’ Dickens appreciated the early masterpiece of Millais in
these terms:

In the foreground of the carpenter’s shop is a hideous, wry-

necked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a nightgown, who appears
to have received a poke playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be
holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible
in her ugliness that (supposing it were possible for any human
creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she
would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster in the
vilest cabaret in France or the lowest gin-shop in England.

But to resume quotation from Swinburne’s essay:

Is not this indeed the heaviest misfortune which can happen to

art, to be trammelled by factitious laws that no one understands
or reasons out to their effect or traces to their natural source ? . . .
But investigation does disprove the reasoning of such critics. In
the sense in which they seem to use the word imitation— it is almost
to say that Hunt or Millais imitates Perugino or Francia. It would
be as absurd to deny the influence of those great painters who are
usually classed together— somewhat vaguely— as Pre-Raphaelites.
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All we can say is that, owing not a little to the influence of such
studies, art among ourselves and elsewhere is growing ever into
more of its pristine strength and purity; that the so-called classical
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style is waning, in art as in poetry; and that the great artists now
living have taught us, and continue to teach us, that without truth
no beauty can exist, and no good be gained by art or study.

So far, however, the quarrel is with the open enemy: presently

it is with a supporter of the new group, with Ruskin, who has
championed the Pre-Raphaelites, subsidized Rossetti and his wife,
given private countenance to the audacity of the first ‘ Poems and
Ballads ’ of Swinburne himself.
As Carlyle had inculcated that the Fine Arts ‘ are sent here not
to fib and dance, but to speak and work,’ so Ruskin had tirelessly
insisted on the morality of art: ‘ The duty of a painter is the same
as that of a preacher’ ; ‘ it is the moral part of us to which Beauty
addresses itself’ ; and so forth. To all of which Swinburne, with
his own message and more of the moral rebel in him than his
friends had, but still as their spokesman, retorted vigorously in the
great book on William Blake:

Philistia had far better (always providing it be possible) crush

art at once, hang it or bum it out of the way, than think of plucking
out its eyes and setting it to grind moral com in the Philistine mills.

With sharper vision in this matter naturally, but not without

further sharpening of it by study of Gautier and Baudelaire and
contact with Whistler, he had seen that the open enemies were
less dangerous to art than the men who, *unfit for service on either
side,’ halted for delivery of eloquent, conciliatory and confusing
discourse between the camps in which art and morality are severally
established. The Puritan, as he saw, is always in the right: right,
and, for all his persecution of art, ultimately harmless. The really
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dangerous enemy is the middle-man ‘ with some admirable self-

sufficient theory of reconciliation,’ who clamours for art even more
loudly than the artist, but will have it on conditions. The half­
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emancipated Puritan, afraid of his partial liberty, and justifying

his fitful enjoyment of it by invocation of an authority which art
cannot recognize: it is he who is the danger.

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XXIII

in 1871, in reply to Buchanan, had his own pronounce­

R o s s e tt i,
ment to make on morality and art, but there is little to our purpose
in The Stealthy School of Criticism. It is a defence, dignified and
persuasive, against libel by a man who had not thought out his
case against Rossetti or Rossetti’s fellows; it is not a discussion of
fundamental problems. Two things in it, all the same, seem worth
quoting. The first is a comment on Jenny:

Neither some thirteen years ago, when I wrote this poem, nor
last year when I published it, did I fail to foresee impending charges
of recklessness and aggressiveness, or to perceive that even some
among those who could really read the poem, and acquit me on
these grounds, might still hold that the thought in it had better
have dispensed with the situation which serves it for framework.
Nor did I omit to consider how far a treatment from without might
here be possible. But the motive powers of art reverse the require­
ment of science, and demand first of all an inner standing-point.
The heart of such a mystery as this must be plucked from the very
world in which it beats or bleeds; and the beauty and pity, the self­
questionings and all-questionings which it brings with it, can come
with full force only from the mouth of one alive to its whole
appeal. . . .

As for the general accusation of fleshliness:

That I may, nevertheless, take a wider view than some poets or

critics, of how much, in the material conditions absolutely given
to man to deal with as distinct from his spiritual aspirations, is
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

admissible within the limits of Art— this, I say, is possible enough;

nor do I wish to shrink from such responsibility. But to state that
I do so to the ignoring or overshadowing of spiritual beauty is an
absolute falsehood. . . .
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It was, however, Swinburne in a like defence of earlier date,

the ‘ Notes on Poems and Ballads,’ who went to the root of the
matter:

The question at issue is wider than any between a single writer

and his critics, or it might well be allowed to drop. It is this :
whether or not the first requisite of art is to give no offence;
whether or not all that cannot be lisped in the nursery or fingered
in the schoolroom is therefore to be cast out of the library; whether
or not the domestic circle is to be for all men and writers the outer
limit and extreme horizon of their world of work. . . . Who has
not heard it asked, in a final and triumphant tone, whether this
book or that can be read aloud by her mother to a young girl?
Whether such and such a picture can properly be exposed to the
eyes of young persons ? If you reply that this is nothing to the point,
you fall at once into the ranks of the immoral. Never till now, and
nowhere but in England, could so monstrous an absurdity rear
for one moment its deformed and eyeless head.

The morality of art, he says bluntly, is such that ‘ all things are
good in its sight out of which good work may be produced.’ The
one fact for art which is worth taking account of is ‘ simply mere
excellence of verse or colour, which involves all manner of truth
and loyalty necessary to her well-being.’ ‘ Her business is not,’ he
says in the William Blake, ‘ to do good on other grounds, but to
be good on her own.’ ‘ The contingent result ’ of good art may
be good living, ‘ but if the artist does his work with an eye to such
results . . . he will too probably fail even of them.’
In all this there is something peculiar to Swinburne or derived
by him from Gautier’s preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin and
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Baudelaire’s criticism of Poe: the doctrine is too definite and too

aggressive to be quite that of his friends. Yet in considering the
work of the group, after Rossetti had separated himself from
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Holman Hunt and collected young disciples, we cannot but be

aware of an unusual antinomianism, though it is only in part of
Swinburne’s own work and in some of Simeon Solomon’s that we
get to those * subtle conspiracies of good with evil ’ which, under
this aspect of the matter, are the characteristic of decadent art.
One thing that must be noted is a peculiarity of Rossetti’s. We
know the manner of his life with Fanny Schott and the rest, and
we know the language he and Swinburne and Howell habitually
used, but whenever as an artist Rossetti has to touch on a certain
evil he is like one who has heard no common or jesting term for it,
seen none of its sorry comedy; he keeps that awed sense of it which
awakes in a boy reading in the Bible simple and terrible words of
the harlot.

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XXIV

I n different ways and degrees Rossetti and William Morris and

Swinburne are influenced by the old literatures to which they
reach back, so that the doom upon their characters is Greek or
Norse or Dantesque or out of Border ballads or out of Malory or
out of the Bible itself, and not the contrived doom which the
modern mind, fed on realistic fiction, expects. And if something
of their attitude towards primary things must be referred back in
this way, their styles must in great part be explained by reference
to their translations and reproductions of old originals.
It has long seemed to me strange that so little importance has
been attached by literary historians and critics to the models sup­
plied by translations. All possible effects of the style of every great
English writer in his original work on the styles of contemporaries
and successors have been considered, to weariness, by genuine
critics and by the writers of those intolerable academic theses
which reach us daily from America. But that what an artist has
done in translation may have had effects greater than any produced
by his original work is not thought upon. Yet, as I have speculated
elsewhere, the style of Dryden in his translations may have had
much more than superficial effect on the style of FitzGerald in a
paraphrase which owes little but substance and stanzaic form to
Omar. In our own day we have seen, or might have seen if we had
used our eyes, that the more elaborate manner of Mr Yeats in
middle life is directly derived, not from the original lyrics of Mr
Arthur Symons, but from that writer’s translations of Mallarme.
And, to come to the point, it is plain that so far as Rossetti made
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his style, it was in translating the early Italian poets, and that much
in the early style of Swinburne was determined by Rossetti’s
translations.
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Here is an unpublished early sonnet by Swinburne, written in

1858-9:

The chosen angels and the happy dead

That have in heaven their habitation sweet
At the first passage of my Lady’s feet
In pity and wonder round her gathered.
‘ What light is this, what fair new thing? ’ they said,
*For such fair presence and so full of grace
Out of the wandering world to this high place
Hath never all this age been carried.’
To be in heaven is right great joy to her
And stand among God’s chosen holiest;
Yet sometimes she turns back in very care
To see me if I follow her to rest.
Therefore my soul is always full of prayer
Because I hear her pray me to make haste.

It is a translation from the Italian, and it is natural enough that

Swinburne should have chosen to do it precisely in Rossetti’s
manner. But out of such things comes also the manner of nearly
all the earlier of the Poems and Ballads, and a tinge of it clings to
many even of the later poems of Swinburne.
Morris made his earlier style out of medieval models and out
of the early work of Browning, so far as it was not wholly original,
and then, rather late in life, was affected by his own Norse studies;
but he too for a season, like everyone else who came in contact
with Rossetti, was affected by that irresistible influence.
Common to the group are usages which have hardly yet been
examined with enough intelligent care. The Pre-Raphaelites,
always leaving the consummate Millais out of account, have been
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charged with faulty drawing; and it is plain enough that Rossetti in

his impatience never learned to draw in the academic sense. But
do not some of the peculiarities of the drawing in his work, in the
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early work of Burne-Jones, in that of most of the group, correspond

significantly with certain peculiarities in the verse of such of them
as were poets? Is it not suggestive that where Rossetti had com­
plete mastery of the medium he yet took so many licences, especially
in his weak rhymes ? In him and in William Morris and in all the
earlier, though not in the later, verse of Swinburne there is evidently
a frequent deliberate use of weak rhyme or assonance or archaic
and delaying constructions where these were easily enough to be
avoided. The mimetic aim in a few of Rossetti’s pieces and many
of the earlier poems of William Morris and in the early deliberately
Pre-Raphaelite poems of Swinburne and in his Border ballads
explains a good deal, but not everything. Rhymes like that of
‘ love ’ and ‘ thereof,’ blank-verse endings like * branches,’ ‘ lute-
player,’ with many other obvious peculiarities of the group, com­
bine to produce an effect closely comparable with that made by
the tentative, mannered, slightly distorted drawing of the early
work of some of these men and their friends.
Rossetti, approaching poetry as a painter, and until near the
end of his life, when trouble with eye-sight forced him back on
poetry, inclining to believe that the day of English poetry was
nearly over whereas that of English painting was but dawning,
naturally carries pencil and brush into his verse. William Morris,
though not till his first and, as I think, strongest poetical inspiration
was spent, habitually writes in the terms of the carver or weaver,
so that his praise of a flower is in the epithet ‘ well-wrought.’ Even
Swinburne, in maturity the least pictorial of poets, has as critic a
subtle appreciation of what in poetry may most nearly be the
equivalent of graphic art, as may be seen on almost any page of
his William Blake, and in the magnificent early eulogy of Baude-
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laire, where he dwells on the excellence of that poet’s ‘ drawing.’

But so far as there is ‘ drawing ’ in the early poems of Swinburne
(there is none in work done after 1862), and whenever, which is
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very often, there is ‘ drawing ’ in Rossetti or in Morris, it is very

different from that which we find in Baudelaire. In the French
master, without becoming obtrusive, it is altogether helpful to
the poem as such; with those English poets, it is apt, whatever its
charm, to become a kind of illegitimate boon. Much of their work
is in one way or another overcharged: Rossetti’s with design and
colour, Morris’s with another kind of design, Swinburne’s with
what it is convenient to call music, though, in fact, it is under
metrical rather than musical compulsion that he works. The poem,
strictly to be called such, comes to us not its bare self but as if
displayed in an illuminated manuscript, or on a tapestry, or,
in the case of Swinburne, with the throbbing of an appropriate
and marvellously sustained surplus of sound in that curious art of
over-tones.

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XXV

T he forms most characteristic of this poetry while it was still

Pre-Raphaelite or at least purely Romantic were fixed early, and
by Christina Rossetti first of all. If in metrical science Swinburne
surpassed all others in the group, as indeed all English poets, in
instinctive metrical art Christina was his better. Look where you
will in her verse, even at girlish work, and there is evidence of
that freedom in service to the genius of the language which is the
privilege of the perfect artist. In ‘Goblin Market,’ with its exquisite
felicity of transition between the grotesque and the lovely, its queer
enchantment of hopping, scrambling, faultless movements; in the
song of songs in ‘ The Prince’s Progress ’ ; in ‘ Dreamland,’ and
‘ Echo,’ and ‘ Passing Away,’ as in a host of minute poems made for
mere child’s play, there is a natural and infallible tightening and
loosening of metre to which we shall find no parallel. But something
in the early verse of Christina Rossetti is in some degree imitable,
and there are the hints on which her brother made the cadences
of some of his best lyrics and Swinburne fashioned certain
of his stanzaic schemes. Moreover, though this is of slighter im­
portance, Eleanor Siddal Rossetti, for all her absorption in Dante
Gabriel, owes something to Christina. Take these verses by Mrs
Rossetti, unpublished like all her work:
I cannot give to thee the love
I gave so long ago—
The love that turned and struck me down
Amid the blinding snow.

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I can but give a sinking heart

And weary eyes of pain,
A faded mouth that cannot smile
And may not laugh again.
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Yet keep thine arms around me, love,

Until I drop to sleep:
Then leave me— saying no good-bye,
Lest I might fall and weep.

There is more of Mrs Rossetti’s individuality in another piece,

‘A Year and a Day,’ which to me seems to announce a poet:
A silence falls upon my heart,
And hushes all its pain,
I stretch my hands in the long grass,
And fall to sleep again,
There to lie empty of all love,
Like beaten com of grain.

If Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the master, it was William Morris

who in the early ’fifties gave the group the most readily imitable
models, affecting Swinburne a little later much more than
Rossetti did. For one thing, Morris was the discoverer of what
could be done with the stanza of three lines. There existed for
anyone hankering after such effects the familiarly known and
incomparable ‘ Dies Irae,’ of which, it may be recalled, the youth­
ful Swinburne made a version:
Day of wrath, the years are keeping,
When the world shall rise from sleeping,
With a clamour of great weeping!
And there were medieval English examples enough. But, as
regards such forms and the general obligation of the group to
medieval English poetry, it must be remembered that neither
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Rossetti nor Swinburne was deeply read in the poetry which

Wright and others had been editing during the ’thirties and ’forties,
the astonishing scholarship of Swinburne in English poetry being
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that of a man but little interested in what was produced before,

say, 1580. Archaism with Rossetti was either Italian or, if English,
only incidental, a matter of a word or a refrain. The English archaic
element in the work of the group was wholly Morris’s. This is not
very evident to those who think of Morris as the author of nothing
earlier and cruder than the pieces in the great ‘Defenceof Guenevere’
volume, and of Swinburne as the author of nothing further from
maturity than the few deliberately Pre-Raphaelite pieces in the
first Poems and Ballads; but an examination of the earliest work
of both, with due regard to the priority of Morris in date, leaves
no room for doubt.
Morris, according to the legend, had the mastery of his instru­
ment at first essay. There is the testimony of Richard Watson
Dixon to the qualities of his very first composition, ‘ The Willow
and the Red Cliff,’ improvised in his twenty-second year, about
two years before he met Swinburne: ‘ It was a thing entirely new,
founded on nothing previous: perfectly original, whatever its
value, and sounding truly striking and beautiful, extremely de­
cisive and powerful in execution. . . . He reached his perfection
at once.’ And there is the poet’s own remark, ‘ Well, if this is poetry,
it is very easy to write.’ Certainly, he has the mastery of his method
in that other very early piece:

’Twas in Church on Palm Sunday,

Listening what the priest did say
Of the kiss that did betray,

That the thought did come to me,

How the olives used to be
Growing in Gethsemane.
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That the thought upon me came

Of the lantern’s steady flame,
Of the softly whispered name.
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Of how kiss and word did sound

While the olives stood around,
While the robe lay on the ground.

Swinburne met Morris at Oxford at the beginning of November.

He knew such things as Morris had published in the previous year
in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, and now, having heard
Morris recite certain other pieces, he at once began to write his
own ‘ Queen Yseult ’ :

In the noble days were shown

Deeds of good knights many one,
Many worthy wars were done.

It was time of scath and scorn

When at breaking of the morn
Tristram the good knight was born.

Another very early piece by Morris, ‘ Blanche,’ is duly echoed when

Swinburne writes:
Then she prayed, if any heard,
And the air about her stirred
As the motions of a bird.

Morris, and the influence of Browning felt through Morris, and

something of the mature Swinburne, are perceptible in a somewhat
later Arthurian piece, also unpublished by him, which dates from
1859:
I love you now so well that verily
It were small pain if both of us were dead.
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God leaves the latest rose some time to die;

Will He not leave us time to love and give
Sweet kisses— time to let my forehead lie
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With your large hands to press the hair back ? Live—

It seems so sad to live now; let us go
Into the church, and then may Goa forgive
If we lie down together and speak low,
The breath between your lips makes tremble mine—
And all these things will be forgotten so
And we shall die there, both of us— each line
Be straightened on that brow of yours, to leave
No wrinkle when the dumb white faces shine
Under the lighted altar. I believe
Christ would not let them hurt my Love being dead—
But you far up in Heaven would feel me grieve
And hear my heavy tears drop always, fed
With some new pain for ever, you would come
With a smooth aureole on your calm head,
Clothed round with solemn colours, and speak some
Strange word of comfort till I fell on sleep
With lips that trembled, passionate and dumb,
And woke to see— nay, sweet, you do not weep ?
I dwell on such early work in pastiche because, more clearly than
the mature published work, it shows the interaction of these poets;
and I quote Swinburne because he was a greater master of pastiche
than either Rossetti or Morris. We shall see less of how Rossetti’s
mind worked in his own early poems, before an exquisite art con­
cealed processes, than in such an imitation of him by Swinburne
as the piece entitled ‘ The Two Knights ’ :
The sea had wailed itself to sleep
Thro’ clouds and blurred fire;
The sad moon seemed to shiver and weep
Like a thin face; but higher
Pure midnight made the stars seem deep
Fierce eyes of wild desire;
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or in:
Six inches off the water-mark,
The wet weed flaps in red,
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Fainter the sun’s side, this way dark,

As if some sea-beast bled
Its heart out on those slabs of stone;
The same sea-beast once whose spine
Is now that rock’s back, each bared bone
A dry notch, bright with brine.

If we are looking, not to the value of the results, but to rigid fidelity
to Pre-Raphaelite methods, it is the youngest and most mimetic
of these poets that we must examine. But Swinburne hardly went
too far when in later life he said that after i860 he wrote nothing
that could be called Pre-Raphaelite. Certainly by 1862 he had
wholly abandoned imitation of Morris and Rossetti; and they
themselves moved aside from the original course. A purely Pre-
Raphaelite poetry, indeed, could have permanently contented
no poet of the order to which they belonged. Its conventions would
have constricted too severely any but a merely decorative poet, a
lover of beautiful things rather than of beauty.
Each of them cared greatly for certain curiosities of beauty, but
in their pronouncements on literature and art there are warnings
enough against an exclusive passion for such things. Contemporaries
might misunderstand some of their enthusiasm for the archaic,
the exotic, but they were not what certain of their imitators became
in the ’seventies and ’eighties.

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O f the effect which Rossetti and Swinburne had on critical

opinion, in regard to particular men of genius, Villon, Blake, Fitz­
Gerald, and others, there is little need to write. But they did more
than establish such men in their due places; they altered the temper
in which literature and painting were approached. A French writer
produced a book on ‘ Ruskin and the Religion of Beauty,’ and
something must be allowed to Ruskin, in respect of the altered
attitude towards painting at any rate. He was a great danger, with
his confusions and prejudices, but he did beyond question create
a public to which art, certain irrelevant requirements once satisfied,
was a sacred thing. But these younger men, dismissing those moral
or social sanctions— for the social argument with the William Morris
of later days is not Ruskin’s or conducive to any misjudgment of
the intrinsic artistic worth of work— made art a thing sacred by its
own virtue. In particular, the sensuous and technical elements
of a work of art were now declared to be not matter for
secondary appreciation, after its message had been taken to heart,
but primary and on occasion all-sufficing. Here is the testimony
of Rossetti:
Colour and metre, these are the true patents of nobility in paint­
ing and poetry, taking precedence of all intellectual claims.
Here is Swinburne’s :
Art for Art’s sake first of all, and afterwards we may suppose
all the rest shall be added to her (or if not she need hardly be over­
much concerned).

And with this new confidence in the absolute worth of art there
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D . G. ROSSETTI
The Palace of Art
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came in a new tone in writing of it. To read most of the criticism

esteemed between the last writings of Lamb and the first writings
of these men is to feel that works of art are being exposed to merely
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judicial or would-be judicial examination. There is a desolating

lack of intimacy, of emotional response, there is not the least desire
to do for books or pictures what Hazlitt did for certain poets when
he reported his first experience of them. With Rossetti, in his few
pages of critical prose, and still more with Swinburne, all that is
changed. Their writing is not the vehicle of mere opinion: itself a
work of art, the criticism presents to us a moving experience. With
Swinburne especially criticism is a kind of passionate reminiscence,
the eulogy inspired by a recent perusal of Hugo or Landor or an
Elizabethan dramatist being coloured by memories of the shock
of delight with which as a boy he encountered great work and
first knew his kindred.
This, and the habit of estimating visible beauty which was natur­
ally Rossetti’s and which Swinburne acquired in the company of
Rossetti and of Whistler and through his own prolonged study of
Blake, affected the character of their prose. In another book I have
shown that if there is any one passage in English prose whence
Swinburne derived his, it is Charles Lamb’s magnificent sentence
in description of the ‘ Bacchus and Ariadne’ of Titian; and earlier
in the present book I have suggested that a certain sentence in
Rossetti’s ‘ Hand and Soul ’ was the model for many in Walter Pater.
A comparison of passages in Rossetti’s criticism of Blake, Swin­
burne’s book on Blake and his essay on drawings by Old Masters
at Florence, and the prose of Pater’s Renaissance, will yield some
curious results.
At the prose of Rossetti in ‘ Hand and Soul,’ almost perfected in
his first essay, a glance has already been taken. Here is a passage
from his criticism of Blake which it would not greatly surprise
one to find in Swinburne’s study of the same master:
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The tinting in the Song of Los is not, throughout, of one order

of value; but no finer example of Blake’s power in rendering poetic
effects of landscape could be found than that almost miraculous
expression of the glow and freedom of air in closing sunset, in a
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plate where a youth and maiden, lightly embraced, are racing along
a saddened low-lit hill, against an open sky of blazing and chang­
ing wonder. But in the volume of collected designs I have specified,
almost' every plate . . . shows Blake’s colour to advantage, and
some in its very fullest force. See, for instance, in plate 8, the deep,
unfathomable green sea churning a broken foam as white as milk
against that sky which is all blue and gold and blood-veined heart
of fire; while from sea to sky one locked and motionless face gazes,
as it might seem, for ever. Or, in plate 9, the fair tongues and
threads of liquid flame deepening to the redness of blood, lapping
round the flesh-tints of a human figure which bathes and swims in
the furnace. Or plate 12, which, like the other two, really embodies
some of the wild ideas in Urizen, but might seem to be Aurora
guiding the new-born day, as a child, through a soft-complexioned
sky of fleeting rose and tingling grey, such as only dawn and dreams
can show us.

The reader who fixes in his mind the facts that Rossetti’s prose
and Swinburne’s are most nearly alike in their writings on Blake as
a painter and designer, and that Pater, as Rossetti immediately
pointed out in a letter to Swinburne, had a hint for the style
of his essay on Leonardo from Swinburne’s earlier published essay
on drawing by Old Masters at Florence, and that Swinburne him­
self was so deeply affected as a writer of prose by Charles Lamb’s
eulogy of Titian, will have the solution of this problem. It is not
that prose of this kind necessarily comes into existence with art
criticism, which has as many instruments as criticism of literature,
but that the attempt to expound painters of a peculiarly imaginative
quality from within, to collaborate with them, to translate their
work into words, produces with such writers, marked as are their
differences, something that might be called a common language.
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They are sufficiently unlike each other; but they are so much more
unlike their predecessors and contemporaries, in this part of their
work, that we are justified in emphasizing the points of their re­
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semblance to each other. If there are at least two passages in Rossetti

on Blake that would pass unquestioned by the average reader who
should find them interpolated in Swinburne’s study of that artist,
there are at least three Swinburnian descriptions of drawings at
Florence that might be taken for the work of Pater in some com­
paratively relaxed hour.
The critical influence of Rossetti, of Swinburne, of Pater, pro­
duced eventually a profound change in the way those choicer spirits
of the age, the destined lovers of art, approached it. Under the
Ruskinian dispensation, for all the genuine fervour and wonderful
eloquence with which Ruskin pleaded for art, there were the con­
fusions of an apologetic passion, justified by the moral worth of
the beloved, cultivated, one might almost say, because the married
are more useful members of society than the celibate, and finding
excuse for its direction in all manner of irrelevant considerations.
But here were men whose passion was for beauty simply as such,
who most valued in art what was most strictly artistic, and who
immortalized their experiences of beauty with as much ardour as
ever went into the poetic memorial of a personal passion.

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XXVII

attitude towards the English masters cannot be

H o l m a n H u n t ’s
defined by any words but his own:

Those English artists who, since the commencement of their

opportunities, have won honour for our nation, have firmly dared
to break loose at some one point from the trammels of traditional
authority. What gave the charm to Wilson’s works was his departure
from the examples of the classical painters whose general manner
he affected. Wilkie, in his ‘ Blindman’s Buff,’ found no type of its
sweet humour and grace in the Dutch masters; and Turner’s ex­
cellence had no antecedent type of its enchantment in Claude or
any other builder-up of pictorial scenery. Flaxman and Stothard
are always most able in those works in which their own direct
reading of Nature overpowers their obedience to previous example,
and so it is with the best painters of our day. . . .

* We have, as an example of trammels, the law that all figures in

a picture should have their places on a line describing a letter S —
the authorities for convention finding the ground plan in Raphael’s
groups,’ he writes, and we are reminded, not only of his own de­
partures from that plan and from the pyramidical, but of the admir­
able daring of those early water-colours by Rossetti in which he
worked on the diagonal, giving us in such a triumph as the ‘ Marriage
of St. George ’ at once the ‘ dim golden dream ’ of Smetham’s
beautiful eulogy and firm geometrical design. Of the academic
design against which Holman Hunt raged there is no better familiar
example than Wilkie’s ‘ Blind Fiddler,’ since it both follows the S in
the arrangement of figures and chief properties and the pyramid
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form in its grouping. But Wilkie had an observant and humorous

eye as the typical Academician of his period had not, and the
trouble was really not so much the S or the pyramid as the fear of
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all salient design, a fear which Rossetti did more to abolish than
Holman Hunt. But all may share in the credit of having freely
resorted to the forgotten colours purple and green and scorned the
conventional gradation of colours. It is necessary, however, to be
cautious in eulogy. With a fine sense of colours as they exist
separately, Rossetti had not the least idea of what light does to
them under certain conditions.
When Holman Hunt was instructing Rossetti and later, he was
disconcerted by the younger man’s ‘ independence of new life and
joy in Nature,’ and complained that ‘ Dantesque shapes of imagery’
had become ‘ Rossetti’s alphabet of art.’ In 1851 it is Millais who
says he wants to see in Rossetti’s drawings ‘ a freshness, the sign of
enjoyment of Nature direct, instead of quaintness derived from
the works of past men.’ Between Holman Hunt and Rossetti there
long remained a personal bond. When Holman Hunt was leaving
for the East, Rossetti gave him a daguerreotype of ‘ The Girlhood
of the Virgin ’ with these lines from Philip van Artevelde written
on it:

There’s that betwixt us been which men remember

Till they forget themselves, till all’s forgot,
Till the deep sleep falls on them in that bed
From which no morrow’s mischief knocks them up.

But as artists they had drifted apart. As the result largely of Ruskin’s
misconception of the early history of the movement, Rossetti had
been promoted not merely to a position of equality with Hunt and
Millais in point of time but to leadership in genius. Actually, he
had left Madox Brown without a notion of oil painting, and had
needed seven months of assiduous tuition by Hunt to learn it,
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and had barely acquired it when he diverged in essentials from his

colleagues of the P.R.B.; but in 1857 the Atherumm was found
describing him as ‘ the original founder of the three-lettered race.’
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Generous minded as he was, Holman Hunt was not made happy

by the exaltation, by friend and enemy alike, of a painter whom
he had with only moderate success coerced and persuaded through
the initial stages of oil-painting. Moreover, both Holman Hunt
and Millais bore some excusable grudge against Rossetti for the
zeal with which at the outset he had forced mediocre, faindant or
only half-converted members on the P.R.B., and Holman Hunt’s
feelings on this matter were probably strengthened when it was
seen how well Rossetti had chosen when selecting such adherents
for himself as William Morris, Burne-Jones and Swinburne. There
was a display of jealousy by Rossetti at the Hogarth Club exhibi­
tion, whence he removed his own pictures as soon as Hunt managed
to borrow for it his ‘ Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ and there was con­
tinual irritation on the other side when ‘ Rossetti’s undergraduate
friends ’ eulogized him without the least reference to the tardiness
of his development. To Morris, Burne-Jones and Swinburne it
naturally mattered not a jot that their regal friend had not so
many years earlier been dependent on elementary instruction from
Hunt, and that in precocity as a painter he had been immeasurably
surpassed by the boyish Millais, but their praises wounded Rossetti’s
seniors. When it became known that Rossetti, bored by incessant
chatter about the P.R.B., aware how far he had travelled on his
own way since, and conscious of a portentousness which was quite
absurd when the redeemers of Art were held to include the oppor­
tunist Millais, had dismissed the affair as little more than a youthful
escapade, the breach was complete.
Long afterwards, in his candid, careful book, Holman Hunt
argued out a case to which, in a sense, there was no answer. He
overlooked the possibility that, if the movement was not that which
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

Rossetti represented, it might be so much the worse for the move­

ment. The fine gifts and earnest intentions and courageous in­
dustry of Holman Hunt, the swiftly attained technical mastery of
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Millais, cannot obscure the truth that there was in Rossetti a

magnetic power which they did not possess. They attained, the
one to be a kind of priest of art, the other to be the most popular of
squires, getting an ample revenue out of pictures for huntin’ and
shootin’, but Rossetti was the man born to be king. What Holman
Hunt’s argument implies is that ‘ Found ’ was Rossetti’s first, and
virtually his last, Pre-Raphaelite work.Well, ‘ Found ’ has among his
graphic work the interest of ‘ Soothsay’ among his poems. It proves,
up to a point, that he was capable of working as a realist, and the
poem proves that he could on occasion produce weighty gnomic
verse. In each, Rossetti turns aside for a moment from his truest
business. That in the picture he should have deviated from his
natural course well after emergence from Holman Hunt’s tutor­
ship hardly helps Hunt’s contention.
Of Ruskin’s attitude towards Rossetti from about 1864, after a
period of almost excessive admiration, it is difficult to write in
measured terms. No man who ever lived has had the right to
address to a man of genius, with whatever mitigating endearments,
words of such insufferable patronage as we find in Ruskin’s final
letters. The assumption that it became him to decide the direction
and limits of Rossetti’s development and to lay down the con­
ditions of a continuance of their friendship (‘ I will associate with
no man who does not more or less accept my own estimate of my­
self ’) is ludicrous beyond laughter, and in the repeated assertion
of his own superiority I find the very note of an irritated eunuch
proclaiming his successes to Don Juan. Ruskin’s financial generosity
towards Rossetti and Mrs Rossetti had been extraordinary, but
no services could excuse the peevish loftiness of that amazing series
of epistles. Disconcerted and partly not comprehending, Holman
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

Hunt did willing justice to all in Rossetti’s art that he could estimate
and was silent or respectfully regretful about the rest. But Ruskin,
without a fellow-artist’s right of censure, offered Rossetti that
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worst of insults, of requiring him under threat to be other than his

genius bade him be. Yet it was Ruskin who had striven, so wisely,
to keep Rossetti to the early water-colours.

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XXVIII

It may be doubted whether anyone in the circle or any outside

sympathizer understood at the time how much was done by the
illustrators to prepare a wider public for the painters. Those
draughtsmen, of whom I have already taken critical notice, were
associated, for the most part, not with a novel, difficult, aesthetically
or morally questionable literature, but with accepted classics or
with acceptable magazine fiction. No one, by laying particular
stress on them, provoked attack on them. At first, some of them
were not even allowed in the magazines to sign their names to their
drawings. Unobtrusively, and often while dealing merely with
contemporary life in its homely enough aspects, they pressed upon
the public some of the characteristic merits of strictly Pre-Raphael­
ite or of Rossettian painting. Some opportunities were missed,
and Moxon, the poets’ publisher, missed two of the most important:
he made too mixed a company of the illustrators of the Tennyson,
and he lost his chance with Ford Madox Brown when the illus­
trations to the W. M. Rossetti edition of the English poets were
under discussion. Here are some passages, showing a very just
perception of the requirements of that enterprise, from a letter
written by Brown:

It will be a repetition of the Illustrated Tennyson. Each artist

thinking only of his own drawings, the whole will be, like that
celebrated undertaking, wanting in that ensemble and uniformity
so much required by the public in any work of the kind; and
gradually the whole, growing beyond the publisher’s first intention
or powers of control, will either remain a continual hazardous
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

worry on his hands, or have to stop short half-way of the goal.

This, however, might be avoided by restricting the number of
artists to a practicable limit; selecting them of a congenial turn of
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thought; and settling beforehand very strictly the size, nature, and
style of the illustrations. I agree myself entirely with Payne’s notion
that wood-engraving publications have begun to pall upon the
tastes of the more fastidious and intelligent of the public. The
style of thing I would myself have proposed I intended should
avoid the commonplace quality, by means of greater dignity and
simplicity of style, and especially by a sustained uniformity of
imaginative and intellectual faculty, versus the picturesque black-
and-white dexterous unmeaningnesses that are now prevalent.

But it was little use preaching to publishers. The majority of

those who issued the famous illustrated books and magazines of
this period had no inkling of the greatness of the drawings that
Millais, Sandys and their associates produced. Those drawings of
the ’sixties have been increasingly honoured for the last thirty
years, but one characteristic of them, their completeness, has often
escaped attention. The most typical of them, and all of Rossetti’s
finished drawings, differ from the typical illustrations of the next
generation and our own in being pictures, the surface filled as if it
were canvas, the equivalent of colour contrasts and harmonies
carefully supplied. It is not an art of making play with white spaces.
To return to my point, it was largely the work of the illustrators
over that wonderful decade 1860-1870 which fitted the public as
a whole to appreciate the painting of Holman Hunt, Millais,
Rossetti and their friends and followers. With this must be taken
into consideration the effect of the poetry of the Rossettis, Morris
and Swinburne, of Swinburne’s critical prose and of Walter Pater’s,
of the introduction of a small but influential body of readers to
the sources whence Rossetti and his disciples, though not Hunt or
Millais, drew much of their inspiration.
In rough suggestion of the position of the plain man before he
144
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

was thus familiarized with the atmosphere, the properties and the
methods of these artists, I will liken it, with due reserve, to that of
a Frenchman witnessing the Romantic explosion without the least
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acquaintance, as regards art, with Constable, and, as regards litera­

ture, with Byron, Scott and the writers admired by Mme de
Stael in her book on Germany. But the situation in France, in
respect alike of art and literature, was much simpler. It would
have been greatly simplified in England if the literary impact of
the new Romanticism on the public could have preceded the
excitement aroused by the painters. Again, it would have been
simpler if Hunt, Millais and Rossetti had made a group more
coherent and enduring. As it happened, of the seven original
members four were virtually useless to the cause; and since
Millais quickly cured himself of the imagination which was with
him a contagious disease easily shaken off by so healthy a man,
and Rossetti developed in his own direction, the battle had not
long been joined when defection and confusion set in. The far
more definable second or Rossettian phase yielded its own difficul­
ties, but in it we do find cohesion; and the eventual complaints of
Holman Hunt, natural as they were and free from pettiness of
feeling, were not very reasonable. For it was inevitable that the
more definite, the more sustained, movement should be recognized
and the earlier, vaguer movement, in which only Hunt himself
persisted, should be viewed, however erroneously, as no more than
preparatory. ‘ The more sensuous phase of taste developed in
Rossetti’s later period was of hothouse fancifulness, and breathed
disdain for the robust, out-of-door growth of native Pre-Raphael-
itism.’ No doubt; but if the mature Rossetti could not be the leader
of the Pre-Raphaelites because he was no longer really of them,
he was a leader nevertheless, and of a movement more profoundly
affecting those whom it touched at all than Pre-Raphaelitism.
The true line of attack is not that Rossetti, in part falling short
145 L
 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

of the Pre-Raphaelite ideal, presently diverged to serve another,

but that he and his disciples were never in the fullest sense painters.
In his rejection of so much of the material of the greatest painters,
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in his discontent with the utmost significance that most of it, how­
ever imaginatively seen, can properly have and his resolve to charge
the picture with all that his most packed sonnet might hold, even
more than in his technical limitations, Rossetti was not of the race
of the greatest painters. It is not merely that he was the painter, as
he was the poet, of mystery. The mystery of the flesh exists for
every great artist, but with the supreme masters of painting it is
educed from a frank record, and with Rossetti it is not. He paints
the woman, in his sister’s words, ‘ not as she is but as she fills his
dream.’ ‘ And what, Mr Rossetti,’ asks Jowett in Max’s cartoon,
‘ would they have done with the Holy Grail when they had found
it ? ’ But Rossetti might be asked questions less impertinent.

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XXIX

T he history of the reputation of the Rossetti circle cannot leave

any student of it with the happy feeling of one who observes a
natural, timely, steady growth to due height.
I have earlier suggested that the poets of his group might have
come before the general public with a substantial body of work
acceptable by all intelligent readers some years earlier than in fact
they did. I propose now to examine the stages of their unlucky
emergence.
The periodical of broad appeal, taking the verse of a new poet
into quarters where neither his nor any new verse would ordinarily
enter, is obviously the best instrument of introduction. Well, we
find no major member of the group contributing to any but a short­
lived coterie periodical till, in 1862, Swinburne writes for the Spec­
tator. Swinburne is then twenty-five, Rossetti thirty-four; the one
not too young to have issued some slim volume of lyrical verse,
the other old enough to have achieved high poetic fame. Actually,
they have given even the restricted public by the end of 1862 no
more than what is contained in this brief list:
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I. ‘ Sir Hugh the Heron.’ Privately printed. 1843.
II. Sonnet, ‘ This is that blessed Mary, pre-elect.’ Catalogue
of the Free Exhibition of Modern Art. 1849.
III. Contributions to the Germ, already noted.
IV. Contributions to the Oxford and Cambridge magazine,
already noted.
V. The Early Italian Poets. 1861.
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

Algernon Charles Swinburne

I. ‘ Congreve.’ Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography.
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^ 57-
II. Contributions to Undergraduate Papers, already noted.
III. The Queen Mother Rosamond, i860.
IV. ‘ The Fratricide.’ (Reprinted as ‘ The Bloody Son,’ when
Swinburne unfortunately changed * I hae but anither ’
into ‘ I hae not anither,’ though the mother cannot know
till the climax that she has now no other son.) Once a
Week. 1862.
V. The following contributions to the Spectator: (1) ‘ Victor
Hugo’s New Novel ’ ; (2) ‘ A Song in Time of Order ’ ;
‘ Before Parting ’ ; (3) ‘ After Death ’ ; (4) ‘ Faustine ’ ;
(5) ‘ Mr George Meredith’s “ Modern Love ” ’ ; (6) ‘ Les
Miserables ’ ; (7) ‘ A Song in Time of Revolution ’ ; (8)
‘ The Sundew ’ ; (9) ‘ August ’ ; (10) * Charles Baudelaire:
“ Les Fleurs du M ai” ’ ; (11) ‘ Victor Hugo’s Philosophy.’

William Morris, in a sense, does not come into the argument.

The Defence of Guenevere volume contained, as I have said
earlier, some of the greatest, certainly the most intense, poetry he
ever produced. But it was too sudden an attack on the public.
Heeded by few, it disconcerted most of those few. And Christina
Rossetti made her way to fame with work which, often closely akin
to her brother’s, yet seemed to recommend itself by qualities not
perceptibly present in his poetry or in that of Morris or in that of the
youthful Swinburne. The last-named, by choosing to appear before
the wider public with two plays on models little known to it, in­
stead of with lyrics, had done nothing in i860 to advance himself
or his friends. Atalanta was a success remote from the common
course, wholly misleading to readers who looked to subject and
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G O B L IN M A R K ET
a n d oth er p o e m s
b y d ir iftm a R o fT e tti

"SoCtLert lte c c a i b y q o l 6 L e ,o £ e .a x i2 l
% 0 §>
L o n d o n a n d C am b rid ge
.M a c m illa n a n d C o . 1862 .

n
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

machinery rather than to the inner spirit. And then came the dis­
tracting sensation of the first Poems and Ballads, with scandal
and irrelevance. Rossetti’s original volume was some years too late
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to be received in the right temper, to be regarded as other than a

precious curiosity of beauty or a further manifestation of artistic
carnality. And with the aestheticism promoted by Oscar Wilde
there was yet more confusion of issues.
In time all this will cease to matter; but it matters still. Mis­
understanding, scandal, cult, craze, but hardly anywhere, for per­
haps thirty years, an honest and sensitive submission to artistic
experience: could anything be more harmful to the fame of a group
of poets? And since the painters could best be appreciated if
men came to them through the poetry of the group, could there be
much worse luck for a group of painters ?
Perhaps, yes; and the curse of that possibly greater evil was on
them. Fortunate is the artist in any kind who, like Wordsworth,
has to be loved before he seems worthy to be loved; thrice for­
tunate the artist, like Walter Savage Landor, who is independent
of the love of all not born to love him, who raises no heat of admira­
tion on casual encounter and lives on unscanned save by eyes that
revere him permanently. These others, in their eventual success,
took captive many soon to be ransomed or to escape.
They were not spared the embarrassment of disciples. Now, it
is commonly said that no great man is to be blamed for his followers,
but is that strictly true? Is there not something the matter with
work which stimulates a cult as Rossetti’s did? I do not suggest
that the Gongorismor Marinismof certain writers in the late ’seven­
ties or in the ’eighties can be matched in the verse of Rossetti at
his worst, or that the attitudes and decorative schemes of the
‘ aesthetic ’ period can be justified out of the work of Rossetti as a
painter and Morris as a designer. But the group did leave itself
open to misunderstanding and afford pretexts for preciosity.
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

* TEstheticism ’ and its products have long been discredited, but

the work of the masters has not been wholly freed from somewhat
sickly associations. It is not yet a safe assumption that a man who
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names Rossetti with reverence has in mind the concentrated power

of his imagination; there is still the possibility that he may be seeing
in Rossetti only what Wilde saw in him. He who salutes Swinburne
to-day may be doing so only out of a memory of the fever Swin­
burne’s most boyish verse put into his blood as a boy. There still
hangs over the whole situation the suspicion that admiration of
the group may be an admiration of beautiful things rather than of
beauty.
Of all the arts, it is literature that lies in greatest peril of a mis­
understanding by which the means may be admired without per­
ception of the end, and the words which are really no more to the
writer than colours to the painter or the separate notes to the
musician be promoted to an undue importance. But painting, in
the degree to which it becomes literary, becomes liable to the same
danger. Here are certain artists in poetry and painting intensely
concerned that the means, the accessories, should be beautiful in
themselves, not only as instruments of a beautiful purpose; and
who shall blame them? There are other ways of working, to not
less beautiful and perhaps broader purposes; but this method is
lawful and delightful. It happens, however, that they tend to choose
the archaic, the exotic, the means and accessories that are curious
as well as beautiful. One seems almost wholly medieval, another
decadent; all speak a language in part foreign or antique, to tell us,
as it seems, only of what is remote from common experience. What
more natural than that stress should be laid enthusiastically on all
this for a while, and that later on, in revulsion from a cult little
recommended by its promoters, these artists should be dismissed
to comparative neglect ?
But the genuine critic, however closely he may study the ways
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by which an artist approaches beauty, is ultimately concerned only

with results. Archaic or contemporary, what matter the language
so that the thing to be expressed is finely expressed? Morality or
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antinomianism, what matter so that the end be attained? As be­

tween age and age, and as between individuals in each age, there
will be preferences, of no profound aesthetic importance, for acces­
sories of one sort over accessories of another, but they are only
accessories, and the wisdom of the artist is wholly in choosing those
which enable him, with his proper powers and limitations, to render
his peculiar experience of beauty.
So it is that much subsequent disparagement of the work of
Rossetti and his fellows is but the error of the ‘ aesthetes ’ inverted.
And if there was spiritual snobbery in those who got a com­
pendiously condensed ‘ culture ’ out of the Pre-Raphaelites,
valuing them chiefly for that reason, there is no less in the en­
deavour to acquire merit by rejecting the Pre-Raphaelites.
In the popular and in the self-consciously ‘ intellectual ’ view of
these matters, it is assumed that there is some method of getting
past an artist to his sources, of tapping directly for ourselves or
indirectly through other artists, more congenial to us at this hour,
the reality on which the demoded artist drew. But nothing of the
sort is possible. There is no way of direct access, and there is no
substitute means of enjoying experience of a reality existing appre­
hensibly only in the particular forms in which Rossetti and his
associates offer it to us. It is not merely that in their originally
almost complete and even to the end considerable ignorance of
early painting Rossetti and his friends had an unhistorical idea of
painting before Raphael. That was only an accident. It is that
Rossetti’s thoroughly studied early Italian poets became in his
renderings of them Rossetti’s, that the medieval world of William
Morris was Morris’s, that the Greece and France and Elizabethan
England of Swinburne were Swinburne’s, and that the only method
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 THE VICTORIAN ROMANTICS

of getting to the reality of each is to study Rossetti, Morris, Swin­

burne. And so with the vision each had of the contemporary world,
and of what is permanent in life: it reveals realities apprehensible
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only in the colours or words with which these artists made their
patterns. To turn away from them is to turn away from our only
opportunity of seizing what doubtless has been and ever will be
part of life but is seizable only in their embodiments of it.
It is by this activity of grasping things isolated from the chaotic
flux and made significant that we live, with art as the prime neces­
sity even for those who are unaware of it. And though we may
reasonably argue the superiority, or at least the wider utility, of
such art as presents to us, amply and soberly, the most readily
recognizable realities, we must also pause to reflect that the art
which seems most nearly the experience common to us all might
better, for that very reason, suffer the loss of a few individual
practitioners of it than an art presenting us with remoter, subtler
realities. Not that we can really spare the least work of art in any
kind! But suppose Poe, Baudelaire, FitzGerald (as Omar) dropped
out of knowledge, and the literature of the nineteenth century is
disproportionately impoverished. Watts, who tried, too often
with success, to speak a language that would have been equally
comprehensible in the studios of all the great ages and centres of
painting, might be better spared than Whistler, in many ways the
smaller artist, and it does seem to me many groups of highly gifted
painters, with more of the specific quality of painters, might leave
us less poor in their disappearance than the Pre-Raphaelites in
their expulsion.
But in all such matters one can do little more than judge per­
sonally. The catholicity which his clients expect of the auctioneer
is not desired in anyone else. One makes one’s self, unconsciously,
out of experiences of beauty, all valuable, all arousing gratitude,
but some more to one’s private purpose, when that manifests itself,
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than others, and there results a certain bias. Yet, whatever value
may be set on what the Pre-Raphaelites give us, it will not be dis­
puted that they have their specific qualities not as mere adjuncts
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but in the law of their being.

THE END

JS5
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INDEX
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INDEX

Barham, R. H. 12 Evans, Anne 50-51

Beardsley, Aubrey 98-99 Evans, Sebastian 50
Beddoes, T . L. 10
Brett, John 84 Germ, The 8, 18-19, 30
Brown, Ford Madox 17,74,78,
on the principles of illustra­ Henley, W. E. 98
tion 143 Hopkins, G. M. 96-97
Buchanan, R. i n Houghton, A. B. 78-79
Burne-Jones, Edward 60-61 Hughes, Arthur 81
Burton, W. S. 85 Hunt, Holman 17, as a painter
Byron, his influence on French 73-74, attitude towards con­
Romanticism 13, and impo­ temporary painting 136, re­
tence on later English Ro­ lations with Rossetti 139-
manticism 14 141

Illustrators of the period, es­

Calvert, Edward 15
timated 77-81, popularizers
Collinson, J. 28
of the new ideals 143

Dalziel Brothers 77-78 Lang, Andrew 52, 97

Dark Blue, The, 52-59 Lewis, J. F. 16
Darley, George 10
Deverell, W. H. 28 Martineau, F. 84
Dixon, R. W. 50, 90-91, 126 Marston, P. B. 88-89, 9 ^
Dobell, Sydney 11 Millais, J. E. as an illustrator
Dobson, Austin 97-98 78, as a painter 82-83
159
 INDEX

Morris,William, early work 34, Romantic Movement, the Vic­

37, change in his poetic torian. Contrast between Vic­
temper 38-40, his work as a torian and pre-Victorian Ro­
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whole 45-47, influence on manticism 4, Tennyson’s in­

Swinburne 125-127 fluence and obstructiveness
6-8, predecessors 10-12, in­
fluence of romantic poetry on
Nettleship, J. T . 86, 87 painting 13-15. Decadence
98, and reaction 99. Parallel
O’Shaughnessy, A. E. W. 52, between the Rossettian styles
87-88, 96 in poetry and painting 118.
Oxford and Cambridge Maga­ New poetic forms 120. Inter­
zine, The 8, 34, 127 action of the poets 125-131.
Growth of reputations 147,
and menaces to their per­
Painting, English, in the Vic­ manence 151
torian era. Its relations with Rossetti, Christina 21, 23, 25,
poetry before Pre-Raphaelit­ 28, her priority 30, the fall of
ism 15, its conventionalityi6, the movement 31, her metri­
and Holman Hunt’s criticism cal art 120
of its formulae 136. The Rossetti, Eleanor Siddal, her
Pre-Raphaelite challenge 16, poems 120, 125
emergence of pattern 17, Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, his
origins of Pre-Raphaelitism challenge to academic paint­
17-18, The Germ 18-30, dis­ ing 17, his part in The Germ
solution of the P.R.B. 22-23, 18-20, his poetry 31-33, his
minor Pre-Raphaelite paint­ painting 72-73, his theories
ers 84-86. Methods 16, and as a painter and poet 101-
defects 146 102, his reply to Buchanan
Pater, Walter 5,59,76,98,133- in -11 2 , his prose related
135 to Swinburne’s and Pater’s
Patmore, Coventry 24, 48-49 134
 INDEX

Rossetti, William Michael 21, the Romantics 67-69, his un­

published poems quoted and
70
Ruskin, John 21, 82, his doc­ cited 63, 67, 117, 125, 127,
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trine misunderstood 92, his 128, 131, his unpublished

relations with Rossetti 93- essay on contemporary paint­
95, 109, 141 ing 107-109

Sandys, Frederick 57, Swin­ Thomson, James (‘ B. V .’) 70-

burne’s eulogy of him 75, 7i»97
his drawings 79-80, 144 Translations. Effect on the
Scott, Sir Walter, his influence styles of Rossetti and Swin­
on French Romanticism 13 burne 117
Scott, W. B. 28
Smith, Alexander 11 Undergraduate Papers 8, 67
Solomon, Simeon, Swinburne’s
criticism of him 52, 57, his Wallis, Henry 85
career 58-59, his qualities Whistler, J. McN. 45-46, 52,
defined 59-60 84, 98, 109
Stephens, G. F. 23, 28 Wilde, Oscar 5, 76, 98
Swinburne, A. C. 40-41,52, 57, Wilson, George 85
his real relation to Rossetti’s Windus, W. L. 85
group 62, his place among Woolner, T . 17, 22, 24, 48

161