Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

A. C. Swinburne

Ruskin is said to have been the original inspirer of these four poets, though Fitz-Gerald’s “Rubaiyat” of Omar Khayyám was not without its influence. But as Edmund Gosse says, “The attraction of the French romances of chivalry for William Morris, of Tuscan painting for D. G. Rossetti, of the spirit of English Gothic architecture for Christina Rossetti, of the combination of all these with Greek and Elizabethan elements for Swinburne, were to be traced back to start—words given by the prophetic author of the ‘Seven Lamps of Architecture.’”

Though the first books of this group of poets, the “Defence of Guenevere” (1858), “Goblin Market,” “Early Italian Poets,” “Queen Mother and Rosamond” (1861), did not make any impression on the public, with the publication of Swinburne’s “Atalanta in Calydon” an interest was awakened which reached a climax with the publication of Rossetti’s poems in 1870. Rossetti had thrown these poems into his wife’s grave, as the world knows, but was prevailed upon to have them recovered and published.

In the success of this group was vindicated at last the principles of the naturalists of the dawn of the century. Here was a mixture of color, of melody, of mysticism, of sensuousness, of elaboration of form which carried originality and independence as far as it could well go in a direction which painted life primarily from the outside. But when this brilliant culminating flash of the early school of Coleridge and Keats began to burn itself out, there was Tennyson, who might be called the conservative wing of the romantic movement, dominant as ever, and Browning, the militant wing, advanced from his mid-century obscurity into a flood-tide of appreciation which was to bear him far onward toward literary pre-eminence, placing him among the few greatest names in literature.

The originality of the pre-Raphaelites grew out of their welding of romantic, classical, and mediæval elements, tempered in each case by the special mental attitude of the poet.

Rossetti and his brother artists, Millais and Holman Hunt, who founded the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood of painters, pledged themselves to the fundamental principle laid down by Rossetti in the little magazine they started called the Germ. This new creed was simple enough and ran: “The endeavor held in view throughout the writings on art will be to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of Nature.”

In their interpretation and development of this simple principle, artists and the poets who joined them differentiated from one another often to a wide extent. In Rossetti, it becomes an adoration of the beauty of woman expressed in ultra-sensuous though not in sensual imagery, combined with an atmosphere of religious wonder such as one finds in mediæval poets, of which “The Blessed Damozel” stands as a typical example. In it, as one appreciator has said, all the qualities of Rossetti’s poetry are found. “He speaks alternately like a seer and an artist; one who is now bewitched with the vision of beauty, and now is caught up into Paradise, where he hears unutterable things. To him the spiritual world is an intense reality. He hears the voices, he sees the presences of the supernatural. As he mourns beside the river of his sorrow, like Ezekiel, he has his visions of winged and wheeling glory, and leaning over the ramparts of the world his gaze is fixed on the uncovered mysteries of a world to come. There is no poet to whom the supernatural has been so much alive. Religious doubt he seems never to have felt. But the temper of religious wonder, the old, childlike, monkish attitude of awe and faith in the presence of the unseen, is never absent in him. The artistic force of his temperament drives him to the worship of beauty; the poetic and religious forces to the adoration of mystery.”

To Swinburne the simplicity of nature included the utmost lengths to which eroticism could go. Upon this ground he has been severely censured and he has had an unfortunate influence upon scores and scores of younger writers who have seemed to think that the province of the poet is to decry the existence of sincere affection, and who in their turn have exercised actual mischief in lowering social standards.

This is not all of Swinburne, however. His superb metrical power is his chief contribution to the originality of this group, and when he developed away from his nauseating eroticism, he could charm as no one else with his delicious music, though it often be conspicuous for its lack of richness in thought.