The instinct that led Arnold to such expression as this was akin to an austerity, sometimes stupidly confused with coldness, that is among the rarest and most secluded of poetry’s enchantments, the austerity of which the poet himself wrote—
Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse! young, gay,
Radiant, adorn’d outside; a hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within.
If Arnold stood in his age for a chastening of the “florid and flowing” Tennysonian manner, though less unequivocally so, perhaps, than Professor Saintsbury would seem to suggest, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Swinburne, in their respective ways, carried that manner to its extreme emphasis. This, I need hardly say, does not mean that the style of any of these men was exclusively derived from Tennyson, but rather that the characteristic evolved by Tennyson from poetic tradition that warrants Professor Saintsbury’s “florid and flowing,” was developed by these younger poets into a poetic diction that was drawn partly from Tennyson’s own sources and partly from Tennyson himself. Just as the influence of Milton, Gray and Wordsworth upon Arnold was modified by the intervening practice of Tennyson, so was the influence of Chaucer, Spenser, Shelley, Byron and Keats in some measure affected by Tennyson before they reached Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne.
To set Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel beside one of Tennyson’s most highly decorative poems, The Lady of Shalott, for example, is to be aware of a new weight in an atmosphere already heavily charged. The graphic presentation of Tennyson’s poem is wrought with great ingenuity of artifice, but the landscape, although it no longer has the rain-washed clarity of Chaucer, is still in the open air. The golden sheaves and the Camelot road and the lilied island have something of the brightness of unfaded tapestry, but they have something also of summer in Cornwall. In The Blessed Damozel we have passed out of day and night and are moving in a landscape of gold and blue and rose thickly laid on gesso and stuck over with precious stones. It glows through a mist of colour that is almost sensible to the touch, and has been passionately created, not by God in Cornwall, but by monks in mediæval cloisters. In Tennyson’s poem there is the artifice of a very expert poetic craftsman, applied to a vision that is direct and material, in Rossetti’s there is a genuine artificiality of imagination, expressing itself in a diction suffused with suggestion that is at once ethereal and strictly formal.
The blessèd damozel lean’d out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters still’d at even;