The peculiarity of such series of words is, that each single word has an emotional meaning of its own (such as ‘heart,’ ‘bower,’ ‘flies,’ ‘droop,’ ‘flower,’ ‘rent,’ ‘dark,’ ‘lone,’ ‘tears,’ etc.), and that they follow each other with a cradled rhythm and ear-soothing rhyme. Hence they easily arouse in the emotional and inattentive reader a general emotion, as does a succession of musical tones in a minor key. And the reader fancies that he understands the strophe, while he, as a matter of fact, only interprets his own emotion according to his own level of culture, his character, and his recollections of what he has read.
Besides Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it has been customary to include Swinburne and Morris among the pre-Raphaelite poets. But the similarity between these two and the head of the school is remote. Swinburne is, in Magnan’s phrase, a ‘higher degenerate,’ while Rossetti should be counted among Sollier’s imbeciles. Swinburne is not so emotional as Rossetti, but he stands on a much higher mental plane. His thought is false and frequently delirious, but he has thoughts, and they are clear and connected. He is mystical, but his mysticism partakes more of the depraved and the criminal than of the paradisiacal and divine. He is the first representative of ‘Diabolism’ in English poetry. This is because he has been influenced, not only by Rossetti, but also and especially by Baudelaire. Like all ‘degenerates,’ he is extraordinarily susceptible to suggestion, and, consciously or unconsciously, he has imitated, one after another, all the strongly-marked poetic geniuses that have come under his notice. He was an echo of Rossetti and Baudelaire, as he was of Gautier and Victor Hugo, and in his poems it is possible to trace the course of his reading step by step.
Completely Rossettian, for example, is A Christmas Carol.[101]
‘Three damsels in the queen’s chamber,
The queen’s mouth was most fair;
She spake a word of God’s mother,
As the combs went in her hair.
“Mary that is of might,
Bring us to thy Son’s sight.”’
Here we find a mystical content united to the antiquarianism and childish phraseology of genuine pre-Raphaelitism. The Masque of Queen Bersabe is worked out on the same model, being an imitation of the mediæval miracle-play, with its Latin stage directions and puppet-theatre style. This, in its turn, has become the model of many French poems, in which there is only a babbling and stammering and a crawling on all fours, as if in a nursery.