With her five handmaidens, whose names
Are five sweet symphonies—
Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
Margaret and Rosalys—
are consummate triumphs of the word-music brought by Tennyson into English poetry. Indeed this couplet of names might be made a sort of text to expound the great appeal to the ear of this kind of poetry, which any one who is deaf to the exceptional and golden harmony of the arrangement need never hope to appreciate. It is perfectly easy to change the order in many ways without affecting the verse; there is absolutely none of these combinations which approaches the actual one in beauty of sound and suggestion.
"Love's Nocturn" which follows is more of the early Italian school pure and simple; and "Troy Town," a ballad with burdens, is one of a class of poem much affected by Rossetti and ever since, which has produced some admirable work, but is perhaps a little open to the charge of too deliberate archaism. It is at any rate far inferior to his own "Sister Helen." But "The Burden of Nineveh" which follows is in a quite different style, and besides its intrinsic excellence is noteworthy as showing how very far Rossetti was from being limited in his choice of manners. But to go through the whole contents of this very remarkable volume would be impossible, and we can only particularise the great sonnet-sequence "The House of Life" (which was attacked for want of decency with as little intelligence as "The Blessed Damozel" had been attacked for want of sense), and a set "for pictures." The first, somewhat thorny and obscure in language, is of extreme poetical and philosophical beauty. The latter, beautiful enough, may be said to lend themselves a little to the attacks of those critics who charged Rossetti with, in the Aristotelian phrase, "shifting his ground to another kind" or (to vary the words) of taking the quotation ut pictura poesis in too literal a sense. Some songs, especially "Penumbra" and "The Woodspurge," of intense sweetness and sadness, were also included; and the simple directness of "Jenny" showed, like "Nineveh," capacities in the poet not easily to be inferred from the bulk of his poems.
Rossetti's second volume, while it added only too little to the bulk of his work—for much of it consisted of a revised issue of "The House of Life"—added greatly to its enjoyment. But it produced no new kind, unless certain extensions of the ballad-scheme into narrative poems of considerable length—"Rose-Mary," "The White Ship," and "The King's Tragedy"—be counted as such. "Rose-Mary" in particular exhibits the merits and defects of the poet in almost the clearest possible light, and it may be safely said that no English poet, not the very greatest, need have been ashamed of such a stanza as this, where there is no affectation worth speaking of, where the eternal and immortal commonplaces of poetry are touched to newness as only a master touches, and where the turn of the phrase and verse is impeccable and supreme:—
And lo! on the ground Rose-Mary lay,
With a cold brow like the snows ere May,
With a cold breast like the earth till Spring—
With such a smile as the June days bring
When the year grows warm for harvesting.
Here, as elsewhere, it has seemed better to postpone most of the necessary general criticism of schools and groups till the concluding chapter, but in this particular respect the paucity of individuals which our scheme leaves (though Miss Rossetti and Mr. O'Shaughnessy will give valuable assistance presently), may make a few words desirable, even if they be partly repetition and partly anticipation. We find in Rossetti a strong influence of pictorial on poetic art; an overpowering tendency to revert to the forms and figures, the sense and sentiment of the past, especially the mediæval past; and a further tendency to a mysticism which is very often, if not always, poetic in character, as indeed mysticism generally if not always is. We find in point of form a distinct preference for lyric over other kinds, a fancy for archaic language and schemes of verse, a further fancy for elaborate and ornate language (which does not, however, exclude perfect simplicity when the poet chooses), and above all, a predilection for attempting and a faculty for achieving effects of verbal music by cunning adjustment of vowel and consonant sound which, though it had been anticipated partially, and as it were accidentally in the seventeenth century, and had been after the Romantic revival displayed admirably by Coleridge and Keats, and brought to a high pitch by Tennyson, was even further elaborated and polished by the present school. Indeed, they may be said to have absolutely finished this poetical appeal as a distinct and deliberate one. All poets have always attempted, and all poets always will attempt, and when they are great, achieve these enchanting effects of mere sound. But for some considerable time it will not be possible (indeed it will be quite impossible until the structure, the intonation, the phrase of English have taken such turns as will develop physical possibilities as different from those of our language as ours are from those of the seventeenth century) for any poets to get distinctly great effects in the same way. It is proof enough of this that, except the masters, no poet for many years now has achieved a great effect by this means, and that the most promising of the newer school, whether they may or may not have found a substitute, are abandoning it.
Rossetti's younger, but very little younger, sister, Christina Georgina, was born in 1830, sat to her brother early for the charming picture of "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin," and is said also to figure in his illustration of the weeping queens in Tennyson's Morte D' Arthur. But she lived an exceedingly quiet life, mainly occupied in attention to her mother and in devotion; for she had been brought up, and all her life remained, a member of the Church of England. Her religious feelings more and more coloured her poetical work, which was produced at intervals from 1861 till close upon her death in the winter of 1894-95. It was not hastily written, and latterly formed mainly the embellishment of certain prose books of religious reflection or excerpt. But it was always of an exquisite quality. Its first expression in book form was Goblin Market, and other Poems (1861), which, as well as her next volume, The Prince's Progress (1866), was illustrated by her brother's pencil. A rather considerable time then passed without anything of importance (a book called Sing-Song excepted), till in 1881 A Pageant, and other Poems was added. A collection of all these was issued nine years later, but with this the gleanings from the devotional works above mentioned (the chief of which were Time Flies and The Face of the Deep) have still to be united.
There are those who seriously maintain Miss Rossetti's claim to the highest rank among English poetesses, urging that she excels Mrs. Browning, her only possible competitor, in freedom from blemishes of form and from the liability to fall into silliness and maudlin gush, at least as much as she falls short of her in variety and in power of shaping a poem of considerable bulk. But without attempting a too rigid classification we may certainly say that Miss Rossetti has no superior among Englishwomen who have had the gift of poetry. In the title-piece of her first book the merely quaint side of Præ-Raphaelitism perhaps appears rather too strongly, though very agreeably to some. But "Dreamland," "Winter Rain," "An End," "Echo," the exquisite song for music "When I am dead, my dearest," and the wonderful devotional pieces called "The Three Enemies" and "Sleep at Sea," with many charming sonnets, adorned a volume which, on the whole, showed more of the tendencies of the school than any which had yet appeared. For it was less exclusively mediæval than Mr. Morris' Defence of Guinevere, and very much more varied as well as more mature than Mr. Swinburne's Queen Mother and Rosamond. The Prince's Progress showed a great advance on Goblin Market in dignity and freedom from mannerism, and the minor poems in general rivalled those in the earlier collection, though the poetess perhaps never quite equalled "Sleep at Sea." The contents of A Pageant, and other Poems were at once more serious and lighter than those of the two former books (for Miss Rossetti, like her brother, had a strong touch of humour), while the Collected Poems added some excellent pieces. But the note of the whole had been struck, as is usually the case with good poets who do not publish too early, at the very first.
The most distinguished members, with the exception of Mr. and Miss Rossetti, of this school are still alive; and, as it did not become fashionable until about five-and-twenty years ago, even the junior members of it have in but few cases been sent to that majority of which alone we treat. Mr. John Addington Symonds, an important writer of prose, began early and never abandoned the practice of verse, but his accomplishment in it was never more than an accomplishment. Mr. Philip Bourke Marston, son of Dr. Westland Marston, the dramatist, was highly reputed as a poet by his friends, but friendship and compassion (he was blind) had perhaps more to do with this reputation than strict criticism. The remarkable talents of Mr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, which could never be mistaken by any one who knew him, and of which some memorials remain in verse, were mainly lost to English poetry by the fact of his passing the last twenty years of his life as a Jesuit priest. But the most characteristic figure now passed away was Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844-81). He was an official of the British Museum, and published three volumes of poetry—The Epic of Women (1870), Lays of France (1872), and Music and Moonlight (1874)—which were completed in the year of his death by a posthumous volume entitled Songs of a Worker. Of these the Lays of France are merely paraphrases of Marie: great part of the Songs of a Worker is occupied with mere translation of modern French verses—poor work for a poet at all times. But The Epic of Women and Music and Moonlight contain stuff which it is not extravagant to call extraordinary.
It was never widely popular, for O'Shaughnessy pushed the fancy of the Præ-Raphaelites for a dreamy remoteness to its very furthest, and the charge (usually an uncritical one, but usually also explaining with a certain justice a poet's unpopularity) of "lack of human interest" was brought against him. Sometimes, too, either of deliberate conviction or through corrupt following of others, he indulged in expressions of opinion about matters on which the poet is not called upon to express any, in a manner which was always unnecessary and sometimes offensive. But judged as a poet he has the unum necessarium, the individual note of song. Like Keats, he was not quite individual—there are echoes, especially of Edgar Poe, in him. But the genuine and authentic contribution is sufficient, and is of the most unmistakable kind. In the first book "Exile," "A Neglected Heart," "Bisclavaret," "The Fountain of Tears," "Barcarolle," make a new mixture of the fair and strange in meaning, a new valuation of the eternal possibilities of language in sound. Music and Moonlight—O'Shaughnessy was one of the few poets who have been devoted to music—is almost more remote, and even less popularly beautiful; but the opening "Ode," some of the lyrics in the title poem (such as "Once in a hundred years"), the song "Has summer come without the rose," and not a few others, renew for those who can receive it the strange attraction, the attraction most happily hinted by the very title of this book itself, which O'Shaughnessy could exercise. That there was not a little that is morbid in him—as perhaps in the school generally—sane criticism cannot deny. But though it is as unwise as it is unsafe to prefer morbidness for itself or to give it too great way, there are undoubted charms in it, and O'Shaughnessy could give poetical form to these as few others could. Two of his own lines—