The Age of Tennyson

by Hugh Walker

POETRY FROM 1850 TO 1870: THE PRE-RAPHAELITES; THE SPASMODIC SCHOOL; MINOR POETS.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(1828-1882).

Contemporary with the great poets, who seem to feel first of all the imperative necessity of understanding and interpreting the intellectual movement of the age, were others, some of them great too, in whose work passion takes a prior place to intellect. Of these the most talented group were the Pre-Raphaelites, and the greatest man was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The celebrated founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a man who had the rare fortune to be highly distinguished in two arts. Other artists—Thomas Woolner and William Bell Scott and Sir Joseph Noel Paton are contemporary examples—have been poets also; but no one has attained a level at once as high and as equal in both as Rossetti. He has also been influential upon others in a degree rare even among men of as great calibre; and finally, he was only the greatest of a family all highly gifted in literature.

Rossetti, though English by birth, was more Italian than English by blood, and he was brought up in an atmosphere largely Italian. Both his literary and his artistic talents showed themselves early. The literary organ of the Pre-Raphaelites, The Germ, received some of his earliest writings; but he had begun to compose even earlier, the two well-known pieces, The Blessed Damozel and My Sister’s Sleep, having both been written in his nineteenth year. The greater part of his poetry was composed in early manhood. On the death of his wife, in 1862, Rossetti, in the transport of his grief, buried the MSS. in her coffin. They were exhumed in 1869 and published under the simple title of Poems in 1870. After his wife’s death Rossetti for a long time wrote little poetry, though he continued his artistic work. In later years the complete breakdown of his health checked his production. He suffered from insomnia and attempted to cure it by the use of chloral, with the usual result. Nevertheless, some very fine pieces, notably The King’s Tragedy, are of late composition. The later poems were gathered together in the Ballads and Sonnets of 1881. Rossetti was also a translator, and in 1861 had published, under the title of The Early Italian Poets, the collection now known as Dante and his Circle. He likewise occasionally wrote prose, his most considerable work being a story, poetical in spirit, entitled Hand and Soul.

Mr. W. D. Howells (quoted in Sharp’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti) says it will always be a question whether Rossetti ‘had not better have painted his poems and written his pictures; there is so much that is purely sensuous in the former and so much that is intellectual in the latter.’ There is certainly an element of truth in this judgment. The sensuousness was the cause of the celebrated attack entitled The Fleshly School of Poetry, which was met by Rossetti’s effective rejoinder, The Stealthy School of Criticism. The poet showed that the attack was in great measure unjust, but he would not have sought to deny that there was sensuousness in his poetry. He would have held, on the contrary, that poetry not only might legitimately be, but ought to be, sensuous. This conception influenced Rossetti’s whole style of poetical portraiture. We see its effect in the fine description of a girl in A Last Confession, beginning, ‘She had a mouth made to bring death to life.’ It is all so written that from it the painter could easily put the portrait on canvas.

But with respect to the allegation of sensuousness, the question for criticism is one of degree. There are two aspects of it, the moral and the artistic, which, though not entirely distinct, are best treated apart. Rossetti’s answer was most successful upon the moral side, though even in this respect there remained one or two pieces not easily justified. From the artistic point of view, it must be said that the sensuousness is sometimes so great as to blur the intellectual outlines. We see this particularly in the sonnets, which many regard as Rossetti’s best work in poetry. He certainly does put into the sonnet a fulness of melody and a wealth of colour not surpassed and perhaps, in their conjunction, hardly equalled in the language. But when we ask if the idea of the sonnet stands out with due clearness, the answer must be in the negative. In the best sonnets of Milton and Wordsworth, and in a less degree in those of Drummond of Hawthornden, of Mrs. Browning and of Christina Rossetti, the idea is precise and definite. Dante Rossetti is a poet who ‘deals in meanings,’ but he sometimes darkens, if he does not altogether bury, the meaning under a wealth of sonorous words. The fault of over-elaboration, which is chargeable also against the pictorial art of the Pre-Raphaelites, is visible here. We see it in other aspects too. The sense of spontaneity is lost; the poet seems to be perpetually aiming at a mark just beyond his reach; and there is an excessive addiction to some of the subordinate artifices of verse. Among these Rossetti’s favourite is alliteration; and the reader is not infrequently troubled with the suspicion that a word is used, not because it is the best, but because it begins with a particular letter.

A defect kindred in origin, but more serious, is shown in Rossetti’s treatment of nature. One of his best poems of this class is The Stream’s Secret. The poet certainly wrote it ‘with his eye on the object,’ for the stream in question was no figment of the brain, but the Penwhapple in Ayrshire. All the more for that reason it illustrates the difference between inspiration and conscientious study. Rossetti did not feel natural beauty like Wordsworth, and his descriptions have not the easy grace of the true poet of nature. He deliberately set out to make a poem, with the result that he produced a fine piece of skilled workmanship.

Next perhaps to Rossetti’s reputation as a writer of sonnets stands his reputation as a balladist; and it may be questioned whether the order ought not to be reversed. Rossetti’s art was far too elaborate for a ballad of the genuine old type. Even in The White Ship there is a note which distinguishes it not only from the true popular ballad, but from such approximations as the ballads of Scott. But poetry ought to be valued for what it is, not for conformity with what may possibly be a misleading standard; and Rossetti’s ballads are noble poetry. He imbibed enough of the ballad spirit to check his habitual faults, and of all his compositions the ballads are the simplest and most natural. The universal favourite, The King’s Tragedy is a grand story told with great fire and energy. So, too, Rose Mary is a powerful and beautiful poem, less uniform however than The King’s Tragedy, for the lyrics between the parts are at best second-rate. It is in pieces like these, and in some of the more clearly-thought sonnets, like Lost Days, that Rossetti proves himself the true poet. The more deeply sensuous sonnets, and such characteristic pieces as The Blessed Damozel, are representative rather of the dangers and defects of his poetry.

Christina Georgina Rossetti
(1830-1894).

Less great but hardly less interesting than her brother was Christina Georgina Rossetti, who, like him, wrote for The Germ, though she published no volume of poems for many years afterwards. Though her course extends far beyond the limits of the period, the poetical work for which she is most memorable was chiefly done within it, and her closest connexions belong to it too. Her first published volume was Goblin Market, and other Poems (1862); her second, The Prince’s Progress, and other Poems (1866). Then, after some prose tales, came the book of nursery rhymes, Sing-Song (1872). From this time onwards, except for A Pageant, and other Poems (1881), Miss Rossetti’s books were chiefly of a devotional character; but one of them, Time Flies (1885), contains some of the finest of her verse.