History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne

by Andrew Lang

She left the rosy morn,
She left the fields of corn,
For twilight lone and lorn
And water springs.
Through sleep as through a veil,
She sees the sky look pale,
And hears the nightingale
That sadly sings.

"When I am dead, my dearest," is not less musical and melancholy. Many of the sacred poems have great sincerity as well as original beauty of form; and some of these, with some of the sonnets, half reveal the sorrow of a life and its religious consolations,—see the sequence of sonnets styled "Monna Innominata" and "Later Life". She is, indeed, a true poet of the inner life and of nature. To institute comparisons between her and Mrs. Browning is apt to cause injustice to either or to both.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

While Tennyson was in the mid-flush of his fame, there arose a school, in poetry and pictorial art, which, like him, turned to the Middle Ages for subjects and inspiration, but also reverted to the ideals of the great Italian painters who were before Raphael. The leader and the eldest of the little Brotherhood was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, son of Gabriel Rossetti, a devout interpreter of Dante, and of his wife, a Miss Polidori, a kinswoman of Byron's strange and ill-fated young Italian physician. Dante was born in 1828, from his earliest days wrote verses and drew, and, after passing through King's College School, became a student of art, and a painter whose colour was undoubtedly excellent, while his subjects were chosen from religion and romance; his portraits being in a high degree romantic, and his mannerisms tending towards the monotonous. They were the paintings of a poet; and his poetry is that of a painter. While some of his poetry, like "The Blessed Damozel," his most characteristic piece, appeared early in "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine" (1856) and "The Germ," he published no book before 1861, when his translations from the early Italian poets gave evidence that, as a translator, he was unique and unapproached. Bizarre circumstances, connected with his grief for the death of his wife, delayed the appearance of his collected sonnets and other verses till 1870, when the work excited enthusiasm among all who desired some new thing in poetry; while certain mannerisms of slight importance spoiled the pleasure of others, and the choice of themes in two or three cases offended the precise. Indeed, the sonnet has no wide popular appeal, and the sequence styled "The House of Life," with its kind of mysticism proved nearly as puzzling, in another way, as the sonnets of Shakespeare. The pictorial and visionary beauty and the novel harmonies of the verse, could not but be admired. The ballads were too artificial for the ballad farm, which is nothing if not simple, though the ballads also have Rossetti's special note and impress, his colour, passion, mystery, and romance. Rossetti, after many years, vexed by insomnia and by sleepy drugs, died in 1882. It is not easy to say whether he was fortunate or unfortunate in that the newness of his manner had been to some extent anticipated, through the delay of his own poems, by the not dissimilar newness of his sister Christina, and of Swinburne. Their works made some aspects of his manner seem not so new, and at the same time not so likely to deter by entire unfamiliarity of tone.

William Morris.

A younger associate of Rossetti was William Morris, educated at Marlborough and Exeter College, Oxford. His Muse was "pre-Raphaelite" and mediaeval in his early prose stories in "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine" (1856), and his later fictions, in the same archaic and fantastic manner (there were seven of them between 1889 and 1898), never could wholly recapture the magic of "The Hollow Land" of his undergraduate days. It is even the author's opinion that Morris never, in his voluminous later poetry, reached the same level of original effect as in several poems in his "Defence of Guenevere," published when his age was 24, in 1858. This opinion can scarcely be the result of "ossification of the intellect," which seldom sets in when the critic is an undergraduate, and is eagerly expecting a new poem from a favourite author. That poem, "The Life and Death of Jason" (1867), was, to some devotees of "The Defence of Guenevere," a disappointment. The vigour and melancholy of "The Haystack in the Floods," and "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," and "The Sailing of the Sword," and the unanalysable magic of "The Blue Closet" and "The Wind," were not in "Jason," and could not be, and never will be anywhere again. In the earlier book the young poet had caught a rare element in mediaeval romance and song, a vague but poignant sense of colour and yearning and mystery, not to be defined in prose, and scarcely, except perhaps in "Sir Galahad," apprehended by Tennyson. We were carried again into such chambers as that wherein—

Beside the bed there was a stone
Corpus Christi written thereon;

or we were brought face to face with some forgotten tragedy of the Hundred Years' War, and saw the true lovers and the parting that they had beside the haystack in the floods, such dull grey floods in a dull green land as Shelley saw in fact, and recognized with terror that he had seen before—in vision.

The new poem, "Jason," retold, with an approach to Chaucer's manner in versification and in mediaeval tone, the immortal pre-Homeric story of the adventure of the Fleece of Gold. The poem, in rhymed decasyllabic couplets, with songs interspersed, should be compared with the ancient poems on the subject, especially with the "Argonautica" of Apollonius Rhodius. Morris had succeeded in telling of the love of Medea and the adventures of the heroes, in the tone of romance, with "abundant fluency, distinctness, and distinction". He had already in hand many of the tales in "that ocean of the sea of stories," "The Earthly Paradise" in four volumes (1868-1870). Of the twenty-four tales half are from classical, half from romantic sources. To some readers the opening, the adventure of English voyagers of the time of Edward III., who find the Earthly Paradise, is more congenial, the heroes being men of this world, than the languor which seems to hang over the personages in the tales of Lotusland. The tales are more like work in tapestry than in painting; the manner tends to monotony; we need a wind from the wings of the Muse of Homer. Morris called himself "the idle singer of an empty day". No man was more industrious, not only in his great poetic task, but in Icelandic studies,—hence the ringing anapæsts of his "Sigurd the Volsung"—in study of the arts of the Middle Ages; in manufacture and sale of objects of household decoration, and of furniture, in glass for church windows, and in printing. Coming into close touch with artisans and labourers, and being more and more impressed by the hideousness of their modern conditions of life, and by the contrasted mindless luxury of many of the rich, he founded a social democratic league, tersely described as meant "to blow the guts out of everybody". The beauty and happy æsthetic simplicity of the society which is to follow after this initial process he described in "News from Nowhere," and he chanted for the toilers in "Poems by the Way". Not for the people, perhaps, in fact for few, he produced translations of the Volsunga Saga, combining the fragments from Icelandic prose and poetry about that glorious tragic fable; and also rendered the Saga of "Grettir the Strong" and others, into an English of his own, with archaicisms of various ages blended. His verse translation of "Beowulf" is obscure, owing to his effort to find living words in the form of their Anglo-Saxon equivalents. These things, and even the series of his tales, such as "The Story of the Glittering Plain," and "The Roots of the Mountains," are delightful to the few but "caviare to the general". In things æsthetic, literary, and revolutionary, the idle singer of an empty day has been a most active and enduring influence.[1]

It has been said of Morris that he is "the most Homeric" of English poets. Despite the excellence of his fighting scenes, as in "The Story of Sigurd the Volsung," and the interest in the details of the arts and crafts which he shares with Homer, he has neither the strength nor the simplicity nor the speed of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," nor the delicate power in the drawing of character, nor the unconscious magic of the Achæan "Father of the Rest". Indeed no English poetry after "Beowulf" is, or in any way could be, Homeric.