Complete Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  Full of symbol as this picture is, it is furthermore permeated by a significance that is not occult. It bears witness to the possible strength of a passion that is so spiritual as to be without taint of sense; and to a confident belief in an immortality wherein the utmost limits of a blessedness not of this world may be compassed. Such are in this picture the simpler, yet deeper, symbols, that all who look may read. Sir Noel Paton has written of this work:

  I was so dumbfounded by the beauty of that great picture of Rosetti’s, called Dante’s Dream, that I was usable to give any expression to the emotions it excited — emotions such as I do not think any other picture, except the Madonna di San Sisto at Dresden, ever stirred within me. The memory of such a picture is like the memory of sublime and perfect music; it makes any one who fully feels it — silent. Fifty years hence it will be named among the half-dozen supreme pictures of the world.

  Rossetti had buried the only complete copy of his poems with his wife at Highgate, and for a time he had been able to put by the thought of them; but as one by one his friends, Mr. Morris, Mr. Swinburne, and others, attained to distinction as poets, he began to hanker after poetic reputation, and to reflect with pain and regret upon the hidden fruits of his best effort. Rossetti — in all love of his memory be it spoken — was after all a frail mortal; of unstable character: of variable purpose: a creature of impulse and whim, and with a plentiful lack of the backbone of volition. With less affection he would not have buried his book; with more strength of will he had not done so; or, having done so, he had never wished to undo what he had done; or having undone it, he would never have tormented himself with the memory of it as of a deed of sacrilege. But Rossetti had both affection enough to do it and weakness enough to have it undone. After an infinity of self-communions he determined to have the grave opened, and the book extracted. Endless were the preparations necessary before such a work could be begun. Mr. Home Secretary Bruce had to be consulted. At length preliminaries were complete, and one night, seven and a half years after the burial, a fire was built by the side of the grave, and then the coffin was raised and opened. The body is described as perfect upon coming to light.

  Whilst this painful work was being done the unhappy author of it was sitting alone and anxious, and full of self-reproaches at the house of the friend who had charge of it. He was relieved and thankful when told that all was over. The volume was not much the worse for the years it had lain in the grave. Deficiencies were filled in from memory, the manuscript was put in the press, and in 1870 the reclaimed work was issued under the simple title of Poems.

  The success of the book was almost without precedent; seven editions were called for in rapid succession. It was reviewed with enthusiasm in many quarters. Yet that was a period in which fresh poetry and new poets arose, even as they now arise, with all the abundance and timeliness of poppies in autumn. It is probable enough that of the circumstances attending the unexampled early success of this first volume only the remarkable fact is still remembered that, from a bookseller’s standpoint, it ran a neck-and-neck race with Disraeli’s Lothair at a time when political romance was found universally appetising, and poetry, as of old, a drug. But it will not be forgotten that certain subsidiary circumstances were thought to have contributed to the former success. Of these the most material was the reputation Rossetti had already achieved as a painter by methods which awakened curiosity as much as they aroused enthusiasm. The public mind became sensibly affected by the idea that the poems of the new poet were not to be regarded as the emanations of a single individual, but as the result of a movement in which Rossetti had played one of the most prominent parts. Mr. F. Hueffer, in prefacing the Tauchnitz edition of the poems with a pleasant memoir, has comprehensively denominated that movement the renaissance of mediæval feeling, but at the outset it acquired popularly, for good or ill, the more rememberable name of pre-Raphaelitism. What the shibboleth was of the originators of the school that grew out of it concerned men but little to ascertain; and this was a condition of indifference as to the logic of the movement which was occasioned partly by the known fact that the most popular of its leaders, Mr. Millais, had long been shifting ground. It was enough that the new sect had comprised dissenters from the creed once established, that the catholic spirit of art which lived with the lives of Elmore, Goodall, and Stone was long dead, and that none of the coteries for love of which the old faith, exemplified in the works of men such as these, had been put aside, possessed such an appeal for the imagination as this, now that twenty years of fairly consistent endeavour had cleared away the cloud of obloquy that gathered about it when it began. And so it came to be thought that the poems of Rossetti were to exhibit a new phase of this movement, involving kindred issues, and opening up afresh in the poetic domain the controversies which had been waged and won in the pictorial. Much to this purpose was said at the time to account for the success of a book whose popular qualities were I manifestly inconsiderable; and much to similar purpose will doubtless long be said by those who affect to believe that a concatenation of circumstances did for Rossetti’s earlier work a service which could not attend his subsequent one. But the explanation was inadequate, and had for its immediate outcome a charge of narrowed range of poetic sympathy with which Rossetti’s admirers had not laid their account.

  A renaissance of mediæval feeling the movement in art assuredly involved, but the essential part of it was another thing, of which mediævalism was palpably independent. How it came to be considered the fundamental element is not difficult to show. In an eminent degree the originators of the new school in painting were colourists, having, perhaps, in their effects, a certain affinity to the early Florentine masters, and this accident of native gift had probably more to do in determining the precise direction of the intellectual sympathy than any external agency. The art feeling which formed the foundation of the movement existed apart from it, or bore no closer relation to it than kinship of powers induced. When Rossetti’s poetry came it was seen to be animated by a choice of subject-matter akin to that which gave individual character to his painting, but this was because coeval efforts in two totally distinct arts must needs bear the family resemblance, each to each, which belong to all the offspring of a thoroughly harmonised mind. The poems and the pictures, however, had not more in common than can be found in the early poems and early dramas of Shakspeare. Nay, not so much; for whereas in his poems Shakspeare was constantly evolving certain shades of feeling and begetting certain movements of thought which were soon to find concrete and final collocation in the dramatic creations, in his pictures Rossetti was first of all a dissenter from all prescribed canons of taste, whilst in his poems he was in harmony with the catholic spirit which was as old as Shakspeare himself, and found revival, after temporary eclipse, in Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson. Choice of mediaeval theme would not in itself have been enough to secure a reversal of popular feeling against work that contained no germs of the sensational; and hence we must conclude that Mr. Swinburne accounted more satisfactorily for the instant popularity of Rossetti’s poetry when he claimed for it those innate utmost qualities of beauty and strength which are always the first and last constituents of poetry that abides. Indeed those qualities and none other, wholly independent of auxiliary aids, must now as then go farthest to determine Rossetti’s final place among poets.

  Such as is here described was the first reception given to Rossetti’s volume of poetry; but at the close of 1871, there arose out of it a long and acrimonious controversy. It seems necessary to allude to this painful matter, because it involved serious issues; but an effort alike after brevity and impartiality of comment shall be observed in what is said of it. In October of the year mentioned, an article entitled The Fleshly School of Poetry, and signed “Thomas Maitland,” appeared in The Contemporary Review. {*} It consisted in the main of an impeachment of Rossetti’s poetry on the ground of sensuality, though it embraced a broad denunciation of the sensual tendencies of the age in art, musi
c, poetry, the drama, and social life generally. Sensuality was regarded as the phenomenon of the age. “It lies,” said the writer, “on the drawing-room table, shamelessly naked and dangerously fair. It is part of the pretty poem which the belle of the season reads, and it breathes away the pureness of her soul like the poisoned breath of the girl in Hawthorne’s tale. It covers the shelves of the great Oxford-Street librarian, lurking in the covers of three-volume novels. It is on the French booksellers’ counters, authenticated by the signature of the author of the Visite de Noces. It is here, there, and everywhere, in art, literature, life, just as surely as it is in the Fleurs de Mal, the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, or the Monk of Lewis. It appeals to all tastes, to all dispositions, to all ages. If the querulous man of letters has his Baudelaire, the pimpled clerk has his Day’s Doings, and the dissipated artisan his Day and Night.” When the writer set himself to inquire into the source of this social cancer, he refused to believe that English society was honeycombed and rotten. He accounted for the portentous symptoms that appalled him by attributing the evil to a fringe of real English society, chiefly, if not altogether, resident in London: “a sort of demi-monde, not composed, like that other in France, of simple courtesans, but of men and women of indolent habits and aesthetic tastes, artists, literary persons, novel writers, actors, men of genius and men of talent, butterflies and gadflies of the human kind, leading a lazy existence from hand to mouth.” It was to this Bohemian fringe of society that the writer attributed the “gross and vulgar conceptions of life which are formulated into certain products of art, literature, and criticism.” Dealing with only one form of the social phenomenon, with sensualism so far as it appeared to affect contemporary poetry, the writer proceeded with a literary retrospect intended to show that the fair dawn of our English poetry in Chaucer and the Elizabethan dramatists had been overclouded by a portentous darkness, a darkness “vaporous,” “miasmic,” coming from a “fever-cloud generated first in Italy and then blown westward,” sucking up on its way “all that was most unwholesome from the soil of France.”

  * In this summary, the pamphlet reprint has been followed in

  preference to the original article as it appeared in the

  Review.

  Just previously to and contemporaneously with the rise of Dante, there had flourished a legion of poets of greater or less ability, but all more or less characterised by affectation, foolishness, and moral blindness: singers of the falsetto school, with ballads to their mistress’s eyebrow, sonnets to their lady’s lute, and general songs of a fiddlestick; peevish men for the most part, as is the way of all fleshly and affected beings; men so ignorant of human subjects and materials as to be driven in their sheer bankruptcy of mind to raise Hope, Love, Fear, Rage (everything but Charity) into human entities, and to treat the body and upholstery of a dollish woman as if, in itself, it constituted a whole universe.

  After tracing the effect of the “moral poison” here seen in its inception through English poetry from Surrey and Wyat to Cowley, the writer recognised a “tranquil gleam of honest English light” in Cowper, who “spread the seeds of new life” soon to re-appear in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, and Scott. In his opinion the “Italian disease would now have died out altogether,” but for a “fresh importation of the obnoxious matter from France.”

  At this stage came a denunciation of the representation of “abnormal types of diseased lust and lustful disease” as seen in Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs de Mal, with the conclusion that out of “the hideousness of Femmes Damnées” came certain English poems. “This,” said the writer, “is our double misfortune — to have a nuisance, and to have it at second-hand. We might have been more tolerant to an unclean thing if it had been in some sense a product of the soil” All that is here summarised, however, was but preparatory to the real object of the article, which was to assail Rossetti’s new volume.

  The poems were traversed in detail, with but little (and that the most grudging) admission of their power and beauty, and the very sharpest accentuation of their less spiritual qualities. Since the publication of the article in question, events have taken such a turn that it is no longer either necessary or wise to quote the strictures contained in it, however they might be fenced by juster views. The gravamen of the charge against Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Morris alike — setting aside all particular accusations, however serious — was that they had “bound themselves into a solemn league and covenant to extol fleshliness as the distinct and supreme end of poetic and pictorial art; to aver that poetic expression is greater than poetic thought, and by inference that the body is greater than the soul, and sound superior to sense.”

  Such, then, is a synopsis of the hostile article of which the nucleus appeared in The Contemporary Review, and it were little less than childish to say that events so important as the publication of the article and subsequent pamphlet, and the controversy that arose out of them, should, from their unpleasantness and futility, from the bad passions provoked by them, or yet from the regret that followed after them, be passed over in sorrow and silence. For good or ill, what was written on both sides will remain. It has stood and will stand. Sooner or later the story of this literary quarrel will be told in detail and in cold blood, and perhaps with less than sufficient knowledge of either of the parties concerned in it, or sympathy with their aims. No better fate, one might think, could befall it than to be dealt with, however briefly, by a writer whose affections were warmly engaged on one side, while his convictions and bias of nature forced him to recognise the justice of the other — stripped, of course, of the cruelties with which literary error but too obviously enshrouded it.

  Whatever the effect produced upon the public mind by the article in question (and there seems little reason to think it was at all material), the effect upon two of the writers attacked was certainly more than commensurate with the assault. Mr. Morris wisely attempted no reply to the few words of adverse criticism in which his name was specifically involved; but Mr. Swinburne retorted upon his adversary with the torrents of invective of which he has a measureless command. Rossetti’s course was different. Greatly concerned at the bitterness, as well as startled by the unexpectedness of the attack, he wrote in the first moments of indignation a full and point-for-point rejoinder, and this he printed in the form of a pamphlet, and had a great number struck off; but with constitutional irresolution (wisely restraining him in this case), he destroyed every copy, and contented himself with writing a temperate letter on the subject to The Athenæum, December 16, 1871. He said:

  A sonnet, entitled Nuptial Sleep, is quoted and abused at page 338 of the Review, and is there dwelt upon as a “whole poem,” describing “merely animal sensations.” It is no more a whole poem in reality than is any single stanza of any poem throughout the book. The poem, written chiefly in sonnets, and of which this is one sonnet-stanza, is entitled The House of Life; and even in my first published instalment of the whole work (as contained in the volume under notice), ample evidence is included that no such passing phase of description as the one headed Nuptial Sleep could possibly be put forward by the author of The House of Life as his own representative view of the subject of love. In proof of this I will direct attention (among the love-sonnets of this poem), to Nos. 2, 8, 11, 17, 28, and more especially 13. [Here Love Sweetness is printed.] Any reader may bring any artistic charge he pleases against the above sonnet; but one charge it would be impossible to maintain against the writer of the series in which it occurs, and that is, the wish on his part to assert that the body is greater than the soul. For here all the passionate and just delights of the body are declared — somewhat figuratively, it is true, but unmistakeably — to be as naught if not ennobled by the concurrence of the soul at all times. Moreover, nearly one half of this series of sonnets has nothing to do with love, but treats of quite other life-influences. I would defy any one to couple with fair quotation of sonnets 29, 30, 31, 39, 40, 43, or others, the slander that their author was not imp
ressed, like all other thinking men, with the responsibilities and higher mysteries of life; while sonnets 35, 36, and 37, entitled The Choice, sum up the general view taken in a manner only to be evaded by conscious insincerity. Thus much for The House of Life, of which the sonnet Nuptial Sleep is one stanza, embodying, for its small constituent share, a beauty of natural universal function, only to be reprobated in art if dwelt on (as I have shown that it is not here), to the exclusion of those other highest things of which it is the harmonious concomitant.

  It had become known that the article in the Review was not the work of the unknown Thomas Maitland, whose name it bore, and on this head Rossetti wrote:

  Here a critical organ, professedly adopting the principle of open signature, would seem, in reality, to assert (by silent practice, however, not by annunciation) that if the anonymous in criticism was — as itself originally indicated — but an early caterpillar stage, the nominate too is found to be no better than a homely transitional chrysalis, and that the ultimate butterfly form for a critic who likes to sport in sunlight, and yet elude the grasp, is after all the pseudonymous.

  It transpired, in subsequent correspondence (of which there was more than enough), that the actual writer was Mr. Robert Buchanan, then a young author who had risen into distinction as a poet, and who was consequently suspected, by the writers and disciples of the Rossetti school, of being actuated much more by feelings of rivalry than by desire for the public good. Mr. Buchanan’s reply to the serious accusation of having assailed a brother-poet pseudonymously was that the false signature was affixed to the article without his knowledge, “in order that the criticism might rest upon its own merits, and gain nothing from the name of the real writer.”