CHAPTER XI
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.
The religious poems form a most important section of Christina Rossetti’s works. She is one of the most profoundly devotional of modern writers. Unlike Arnold and Clough, she is not a poet of doubt but of faith; unlike Browning’s, her creed is rather a creed of feeling than of intellect. But while she is not touched with the doubt of the age she is touched with its sadness. Her devotional pieces have sometimes, as in Advent, the ring of conquering faith, but more often they have in them something of a wail. What Dr. John Brown called the ‘inevitable melancholy’ of women seems to find a voice in Christina Rossetti; and though she is bound by her faith to an ultimately optimistic view, her habitual tone of mind is gloomy. ‘Vanity of vanities’ is the title of her finest sonnet, and it is also the conclusion she draws from the life of this world.
One of the praiseworthy points of Christina Rossetti’s work is that, while invariably imaginative, it never fails to be clear. In this respect she far surpasses her brother. The marks of the artist’s chisel are, as we have seen, too conspicuous in his work; in hers they are invisible. Yet few writers are more carefully artistic than she. Less ambitious in her aims than Dante Rossetti, her work impresses the reader with its adequacy to those aims. Herein she has an advantage over Mrs. Browning also. The latter has produced a far greater body of work, and at her best writes with far more strength than Miss Rossetti; but on the other hand Miss Rossetti is free from those astonishing lapses into bathos or triviality or mere bad taste which disfigure Mrs. Browning’s poetry. The two poetesses meet most closely in their respective series of sonnets—Monna Innominata and the Sonnets from the Portuguese. These are among the masterpieces of each, for both were peculiarly happy in the sonnet form; Christina Rossetti because she was an artist by nature, Mrs. Browning probably because the form compelled her to be an artist. The comparison is unquestionably in favour of Mrs. Browning. The Sonnets from the Portuguese are richer and deeper than Monna Innominata. They record a love actually felt; and they are the product of an intellect wider, though perhaps less fine than Christina Rossetti’s. But as regards the form, it is by no means clear that the advantage lies with the elder writer. Mrs. Browning’s sonnets are sometimes laboured in expression; Christina Rossetti’s have an inimitable ease, all the more delightful because in modern poetry it is rare. Her beautifully pure style is one of her greatest merits; and it is also one of the most striking points of contrast between her and her brother. A sonorous richness is characteristic of his style, a fine simplicity of hers. This simplicity, and the fineness of touch and delicacy of taste which accompanied it, served her well in those poems of the supernatural where her imaginative flight is highest. She is a mistress in the fairy realm, and in its own class Goblin Market is unsurpassed.
William Edmondstoune Aytoun
(1813-1865).
Another school which sprang up about the middle of the century, taking its rise in the longing for something deeper and more satisfying than had been recently in vogue, was that nicknamed ‘the Spasmodic.’ The name was fixed upon the school by the extremely clever satirist of it, William Edmondstoune Aytoun, himself a poet of a very different family, that of Scott. Aytoun is best known from his Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers (1848), narratives of martial exploit and tragic sorrow written in animated but excessively rhetorical verse. He was also, in conjunction with Mr. (afterwards Sir) Theodore Martin, the author of the Bon Gaultier Ballads (1845), one of the most amusing collections of comic verse of this century. His satire of the Spasmodic School is contained in Firmilian (1854), a mock-serious piece purporting to be by a member of the school. It was at the time customary to say that Aytoun had killed the Spasmodic School. If he had done so he would hardly have deserved well of literature. But though it is true that the Spasmodic Poets shot up like a rocket only to come down like the spent stick, both the rise and the fall were due partly to whims of popular taste, while the main cause of the fall lay in defects of the writers which satire did not make and could do little to remedy. On the whole, Firmilian was more likely to have helped the school than to have hurt it if it had contained in itself the seeds of long life. But the name ‘spasmodic’ was only too accurately descriptive of more than its style,—unfortunately so, for both the chief members, Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith, possessed talents for poetry in some respects very high.
Sydney Dobell
(1824-1874).
Sydney Dobell had the misfortune to be born a member of a narrow and intense religious sect, in which his talents caused him to be regarded as the destined instrument for some grand design of providence. He outgrew the sect, but never quite outgrew the education it had given him and the ideas it had instilled. From about 1850 he devoted himself chiefly to literature. His writings are The Roman (1850), Balder (1853), Sonnets on the War (1855), in which he collaborated with Alexander Smith, and England in Time of War (1856). But his health failed, and though he lived eighteen years longer he wrote little more of consequence.
‘He never weeded his garden,’ wrote Dr. John Brown of him, ‘and will, I fear, be therefore strangled in his waste fertility.’ This is the central truth about Dobell. Few poets are so uneven, perhaps hardly any poet capable of rising so high has ever sunk so low. Many passages are mere fustian, some are outrages against all taste; but others have a sublimity not often surpassed.
At the beginning Dobell gave promise of development which, if fulfilled, would have led him very high indeed. In the short interval between The Roman and Balder the youthful author had grown surprisingly. The Roman, a fervid poem carrying on a Byronic tradition of interest in Italy, has all the faults of youth. It is too long, and it is bombastic. Its chief merit is width of sympathy; and it also contains here and there hints that promise in the future reach of thought. In Balder we see this promise redeemed. It is far more forcible than The Roman and it is loaded with thought. Balder was a poem of vast design. It was to be in three parts, of which only one was ever published. The purpose was, in the words of the author’s preface, to trace ‘the progress of a human being from Doubt to Faith, from Chaos to Order. Not of Doubt incarnate to Faith incarnate, but of a doubtful mind to a faithful mind.’ The design therefore bears a certain general resemblance to that of Paracelsus. Balder is not equal to that great poem. It is even more difficult while less profound, and it is especially far less of a unity. It is, strictly speaking, paradoxical to regard as a whole what proclaims itself as a part; but a part of a great design may have completeness in itself, and this Balder has not.
Again, if we regard the poem in the light most favourable to it, as a collection of passages in verse, we have to admit the most amazing inequalities. Few passages in literature are more hideous than the description of the monster on which Tyranny rides; but, on the other hand, the best passages may challenge comparison with all but the greatest poetry. Even this comparison has been sometimes made. The description of Chamouni has been said to rival the great hymn of Coleridge, and that of the Coliseum the celebrated stanzas of Byron on the same subject. The comparison, especially with Coleridge, is unkind to Dobell. At his best he cannot rival one of the most poetic minds in all literature in one of its highest flights. Nevertheless, both passages are exceedingly good. The subjects moreover are characteristic. Magnitude and massiveness are congenial to Dobell, and almost necessary to draw out his best. ‘Alone among our modern poets,’ says Dr. Garnett, ‘he finds the sublime a congenial element.’ It is in such passages as those named, and in Balder’s magnificent vision of war, that Dobell shows the grand material of poetry that was in him.
For this reason it might have been expected that Dobell’s next volumes, Sonnets on the War and England in Time of War, would have been more uniformly good. The Roman proves that he had the fire of patriotism in his veins, and many passages of his verse show that this fire was not all spent, as most of Byron’s was, to warm other nations than his own. Of all the poets then living, Dobell had the largest share of Tennyson’s patriotic fervour and of his love for warlike themes. Nevertheless, the Sonnets on the War are of but moderate merit; and though England in Time of War contains some powerful pieces, it has all the inequality of Dobell’s earlier poetry. Dobell had learnt little of the art of self-criticism, and whether he had the capacity to learn must remain doubtful. He afterwards wrote a few fine poems, such as The Magyar’s New-Year-Eve and The Youth of England to Garibaldi’s Legion, but broken health prevented him from undertaking any great work. He remains therefore a poet great by snatches. A selection, including the passages already mentioned, An Evening Dream, with its stirring ring of heroism, the fascinating ballad, Keith of Ravelston, and some others, might be made, which would greatly raise his reputation. The volume would not be large, but the contents would be excellent.
Alexander Smith
(1829-1867).
Next in importance among the Spasmodic Poets to Dobell was Alexander Smith. He was the son of a pattern-designer of Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, and in his now little known but quietly pleasing novel, Alfred Hagart’s Household, he has embodied a good deal of autobiographic matter. He was also the author of a thoughtful and well-written volume of essays, Dreamthorp. But he is first and chiefly a poet. His earliest volume was A Life Drama (1853), which excited a degree of interest rarely roused by the first work of a young author. It was warmly praised and loudly condemned; and the result of the controversy that raged over it was to make the author for a short time one of the most prominent writers in the kingdom. But his fame speedily declined, and City Poems (1857), though it contains some of his best work, was coldly received. Edwin of Deira (1861) was somewhat more successful, but was far from reviving the interest which had centred in A Life Drama.
The present generation, which has been unjust to Dobell, has dealt still more hardly with Alexander Smith. The Nemesis of excessive praise is unjust depreciation, and both have been Smith’s lot. He has been denied the title of poet altogether; but he is a poet, and even a considerable one. He shares both the defects and the excellences of Dobell, never sinking so low, and, on the other hand, never rising as high. His execution is unequal, he rants, he uses metaphor to excess, he is by no means free from affectation. But though the Life Drama is crude and unequal, there is plenty of promise in it. There was ground to hope that the spirit from which it proceeded was like a turbid torrent which would by-and-by deposit its mud and flow on strong and clear. To those who hoped thus Edwin of Deira was disappointing. A good deal of the mud had been deposited, the execution was more perfect, but there was less strength and less volume of thought than might have been expected. It is in his minor pieces and in occasional lines and passages that Smith shows best. There is rare beauty in the melancholy close of the lyric Barbara in Horton. The picture of the sphinx, ‘staring right on with calm eternal eyes,’ has the true touch of imagination; and so has the image of the wind smiting ‘his thunder-harp of pines.’ Glasgow in the City Poems, is a strong as well as a beautiful piece. There can be no question of the imaginative power of this picture of the city in its cloud of smoke pierced by sunlight:
‘When sunset bathes thee in his gold,
In wreaths of bronze thy sides are rolled,
Thy smoke is dusky fire;
And, from the glory round thee poured,
A sunbeam like an angel’s sword
Shivers upon a spire.
Thus have I watched thee, Terror! Dream!
While the blue night crept up the stream.’
Coventry Patmore
(1823-1896).
There remain two or three considerable poets whom it is difficult to classify. Coventry Patmore cannot be placed in either the Pre-Raphaelite or the Spasmodic School, and though he has some points of affinity with the poets of the intellectual movement, they are not close enough to justify ranking him with them. Patmore is especially the poet of domestic love. His greatest work, The Angel in the House (1854-1856), was meant to be a poem on married life. In the opening the poet congratulates himself that he, though born so late, has had the good fortune to discover ‘the first of themes sung last of all.’ As he proceeded however he found his mistake, and never carried out his design; but it imparted the characteristic tone of quiet domestic affection to his verse. He may be described as the Wordsworth of the home. He is seldom if ever great, but his verse at its best has a simple sweetness, with an occasional dignity, that is exceedingly pleasing. It is unfortunate that against the merits of the better passages of The Angel in the House there has to be set the weakness of the letters of Jane. Patmore’s purpose was to fit the thought to the character; but merely weak thought and merely weak character have no right to a place in poetry such as this. There is no dramatic realisation and no humour to justify them.
The Unknown Eros (1877) is a work strangely different from The Angel in the House; it is more lyrical and more ambitiously imaginative; and for this very reason it brings into greater prominence Patmore’s weaknesses. There is a frequent sense of effort. The meaning is often obscure, and there are here and there, as in the earlier poem, surprising lapses of taste. The poem recalls Drummond of Hawthornden, not only by the rhythm, but also by a certain ‘preciosity’ of diction and imagery.
The second Lord Lytton
(1831-1891).
The second Lord Lytton, best known in literature by his pseudonym of Owen Meredith, must also be ranked among ‘the unattached’ of literature. He had a distinguished diplomatic career which more than once interrupted his pen. But, except for the intervals caused by his various ambassadorships and his eventful tenure of the Viceroyalty of India, Lytton was, from 1855 to his death, a diligent writer. In 1855 Clytemnestra and other Poems appeared, while Marah was a posthumous work. The greater part of Lytton’s writings is poetical, and their total bulk is very great. It is indeed too great for his fame, and most of his poems would be improved by condensation. Lytton presents a singular example of heredity, which, in his case, showed itself in a manner damaging to his reputation. We have seen how the first Lord Lytton veered with every turn of the popular taste. The second Lord Lytton changed his style, chameleon-like, with almost every poet he happened to be reading. The consequence is, in the first place, that his own style is not easily discovered; and in the second place that he has been accused of plagiarism with more show of reason than almost any other man of equal literary rank. It is not merely that he echoes successively the pensive sentiment and melancholy reflectiveness of Arnold, the rich diction of Tennyson, the headlong abundance of Browning, the lyrical sweetness of Shelley, or that he in a snatch or two almost paraphrases Byron. In Lucile, his indebtedness to George Sand is far more extensive. It is true he avowed that he had taken from her the story of the piece; but the story is the principal part of it, and no writer ought to borrow quite so much from another. The fault is a serious one, and it is reason sufficient for the belief that Owen Meredith will never take a high place in poetry; yet his endowments were almost great, his taste was purer than his father’s, and had he been more independent-minded he might have stood high in the second class of the poets of the century.
J. B. Leicester Warren, Lord de Tabley
(1835-1895).
J. B. Leicester Warren, Lord de Tabley, was a man of richer poetic gifts, who might have done very great work had he met with popular encouragement. He began his poetic career as early as 1859, but his first volume of importance was Præterita, issued under the pseudonym of William Lancaster, in 1863. For the next ten years he was an active writer. Partly his own taste and partly admiration for Atalanta in Calydon induced him to attempt the classical drama; and his two experiments, Philoctetes (1866) and Orestes (1867), rank among the most finished of their class. They secured the warm approval of the best judges, but they did not become popular. He tried novels, also without winning popularity; and after two more experiments in verse—Rehearsals (1870) and Searching the Net (1873)—he almost disappeared from the ranks of authors for twenty years; for the Soldier of Fortune, though bulky, can hardly be considered important. It was the reissue in 1893 of his best pieces under the title of Poems Dramatic and Lyrical that first made Lord de Tabley’s name widely known. So marked was the success of this collection that it was followed two years later by another, which was less successful because it was the result of a less rigid selection.
These volumes represent Lord de Tabley at his best, and that best is very good indeed. Such pieces as the Hymn to Astarte, the Woodland Grave and Jael, would do honour to any poet. There is intense dramatic power in the last-named piece, and a rich magnificence of style in the others. A tendency to sameness may sometimes be detected. He has, for example, one favourite colour, and the whole world is seen by him bathed in an amber light. There are also here and there echoes of contemporary poets, such as Browning, and still more, Swinburne, whose fulness of sound attracted De Tabley. But he is an essentially independent poet, and had he been encouraged to write he would doubtless have grown increasingly independent. Few losses in contemporary literature are more serious than that occasioned by his almost complete silence between 1873 and 1893, just the years when, by reason of his age, his work ought to have been best. He was a great man unrecognised, and the failure to recognise is sometimes severely punished.
William Morris
(1834-1896).
Most of Lord de Tabley’s contemporaries by birth belong rather to the subsequent period than to the Age of Tennyson. Even Swinburne did so, though before 1870 he had, by the publication of Atalanta in Calydon (1865), enriched English literature with one of its most perfect dramas on the Greek model, and by the Poems and Ballads (1866) had ‘raised a storm, and founded a school.’ The fact that he founded a school makes him rather the poetical leader of the present generation than a member of the preceding one. In some ways Lord de Tabley has more affinity to this later band than to those who were under the dominion of Carlyle and Browning and Tennyson. He certainly shows the workings of a new spirit, and seems to feel the old ideals insufficient; but his twenty years of literary eclipse serve to fix him chronologically rather among the older men. For a different reason William Morris, a man just one year older than De Tabley, also belongs, as a poet, to this period. Morris was a man who played many parts in life, and he played them not concurrently, but rather successively. In his characters as high priest of domestic art and as prophet to the Socialists he is identified with the closing quarter of the century; while his greatest achievements in poetry belong to the third quarter. The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems (1858) was his first volume of verse. Then after nine years came The Life and Death of Jason, followed almost immediately by The Earthly Paradise (1868-1870). Morris afterwards translated the Æneid and the Odyssey, and he also did much to make familiar in England the spirit of Icelandic literature. His Sigurd the Volsung (1876) is certainly the finest English poem inspired by Scandinavia, and perhaps his greatest work.
Morris is the most prominent example in these later days of that revival of the mediæval spirit which was initiated by the Romanticists of the latter part of last century, which attained its fullest flower in Scott, and which shows itself in such varied aspects in Rossetti’s poetry, in the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and in the Oxford theologians. Morris exhibits it in a way quite his own. Chaucer more than any one else is his master in poetry. To him Morris reverted for the model of his verse, and the old poet’s influence is seen in the disciple’s mode of conception as well as in many turns of expression. One thing however Morris could not learn, though Chaucer was eminently qualified to teach it, and that was the true narrative spirit. Morris chose the narrative form, but the interest of his poetry rarely lies in the story. He does not himself care greatly for the story. He is never passionate; he is too calm to enter deeply into the feelings or to be absorbed in the fortunes of his characters. The charm of his poetry resides rather in leisurely and restful beauty of description. In this respect it ranks high, but seldom attains absolute mastery. Nearly all of Morris is readable and enjoyable, but few of his lines linger in the memory, and perhaps the only one frequently quoted is that in which he describes himself as ‘the idle singer of an empty day.’ Morris was more than this, but it may be questioned whether there is enough either of the substance of thought in his verse or of melody and pure poetic beauty to keep it long alive.
minor poets.
Sarah Flower Adams
(1805-1848).
Sarah Flower Adams is sure of at least a small niche in the temple of the English poets were it but for the beautiful hymn, ‘Nearer, my God, to thee.’ Her Vivia Perpetua is an ill-constructed drama, partly redeemed by fine passages.