Four Victorian Poets: a Study of Clough, Arnold, Rossetti and Morris/Dante Gabriel Rossetti

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Four Victorian Poets: a Study of Clough, Arnold, Rossetti and Morris
by Stopford Augustus Brooke

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

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4346013Four Victorian Poets: a Study of Clough, Arnold, Rossetti and Morris — Dante Gabriel RossettiStopford Augustus Brooke

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

In the course of the history of all the arts, and perhaps most plainly in the history of poetry, similar conditions recur, not in particulars, but in general outline. The different circumstances of each age naturally modify the conditions away from accurate similarity, but in the main development of the art, a time comes when it follows lines resembling those it has previously followed, and this analogous condition has been produced by similar causes. I have already in other places noticed such a similarity between the creation of a literary poetry—to use an inadequate term—by Keats, and that of a similar kind of poetry by Rossetti and Morris. Both poetries have little to do with the age in which they were written. They reject, on the whole, the present and abide in the past. Their subjects are not the subjects of their day, nor are they influenced to any great extent by the thoughts or emotions of the world around them. Their main desire is to live outside of that world, to assimilate a different realm of thought and feeling, to find beauty as she was in the past not as she seems to be in the present, to live in the imagined not in the actual world; and yet to keep the imagined world true to the main lines of nature and human nature. "Let us escape," they cry, "into a lovelier earth, a purer air, a simpler and more natural life."

We can trace, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the beginnings of such a cry in Arnold's passing endeavour to find his subjects in Greek, Norse, and medieval story, in his reiterated longing for beauty and calm, apart from the noise of warring thought and low desires. We have looked back to the time when in the fifties and sixties of the last century the old faiths and theories of life were thrown into the hissing furnace of scientific and historical criticism, and no one knew what would emerge when the amalgam had cooled. We have seen how this confused world, and the tossed world of his own heart, were too much for Arnold. He could not escape from the trouble when he was young. He never quite escaped from it. But Rossetti did, and so did Morris.

The history of their poetry repeats the history of the poetry of Keats. It had no connexion with the thoughts concerning man and the war around them which so deeply influenced poetry from Blake to Shelley. The ideas Shelley sought to revive, those also which Byron drove at the heads of men, made the slightest possible impression on Keats. He does not, on the whole, seem to be aware of their existence. The controversies, furies, and passions which had collected round them in the realms of social, political, and religious thought, and which had lashed Byron and Shelley into poetic rage, were to him, if ever he deigned to be conscious of them, weariness and vexation of spirit. And the condition of the England in which he lived and of which he said, "Glory and loveliness have passed away," gave him no impulse. He did not go to Italy or Greece in the body, but he fled thither in the spirit. He sought loveliness and young ardours in fable, in love's world of myth, legend, and tale. There, he thought, beauty lies asleep, and I will be the young prince who shall awake her. And through the deep undergrowth not of the briar-rose, but of thorn and thistle, hemlock and darnel, his fervid spirit pierced its way. He kissed the princess and she awoke to life. Together they brought forth a new poetry. It was a lovely child, but, unsupported, unnourished by any emotion of the present, only living in the past, it never married itself to any vital power in the England of its day, and it had then no children. It was an episode in the great epic of poetry; and when the new movement, about 1832, began with Tennyson and Browning it did not follow Keats into the beauty of the past; it knit itself to living emotions and ideas of the present. For England had then, as I have already noticed in this book, awakened to fresh thought and national passion, to new ideas and their attendant emotions; and out of these proceeded powers of action which ran like fire through the whole body of men and women who loved thoughts, and thought out what they loved.

That is a slight sketch of the history of the poetry of Keats. I have elsewhere expanded it and do not wish to repeat it. A similar history now unfolded itself. By 1853, when Rossetti had finished the poems which we find in his first volume, the ideas and their impelling emotions which had begun to shape themselves clearly in 1830, which had awakened in England a political, religious, and social movement, and which, by their passion, had stirred Browning, Tennyson, and others to write poetry—were subjected to continual attacks, rapidly developing through the following years, from historical criticism and science. Doubt, especially in the case of the religious ideas, collected round them. So far as the history of poetry is concerned, the struggle took place over religious conceptions, both those held by the orthodox, and by the more liberal theologians. The ideas accepted with joy from the school of which Newman was the moving force, or from the school which Maurice may be said to have founded, were now denied or at least subjected to a cold investigation. And what had been their beauty was stained, till there was little or no pleasure and peace left in them for the imagination. Tennyson and Browning, however, would not let their spiritual essence go. Browning did not descend into the arena at all, nor was he one whit disturbed by the noise of the contest. He went quietly on, realising his own soul and what it had to say. Tennyson did enter into the fight, and was somewhat disturbed by it. In Memoriam, published in 1850, records what he thought of it during the years between 1842 and '50. Later on, his description of that dim grim battle in the West where Arthur died, himself in doubt, and where friend and foe were shadows in the mist,

And friend slew friend, not knowing whom he slew,
And some had visions out of golden youth,
And some beheld the faces of old ghosts
Look in upon the battle,

was his record of this time, and all it meant for those who, in its war, still held to their standards. Nor indeed, when he wrote the Passing of Arthur, was his own soul freed from the agony of the battle. Nevertheless, he did not give way. Like St. Paul, "cast down but not destroyed," there were certain heights of faith and thought in his secret soul to which, undismayed, and unheeding of the confused strife, he retired when he pleased. But the others—down in the heat of the contest, on the burning sand—we have seen in what a condition they were in the poetry of Clough and Arnold. Misery and restlessness; changing and divided thoughts; doubts and longing for peace and calm; nothing left but duty; faith retired to her interlunar cave; the noise and confusion of the battle driving men distracted who cared for the ancient ideals; even among those who had no poetic instincts a certain vague distress; beauty gone, ugliness and tumult filling the world of thought. And in common life, materialism growing; conventions and maxims again tyrannising over society; art, creation, imagination, and truth utterly gone out of it. This was the state of things even in 1847 when Rossetti began to write poetry, much more in 1853 when his first poems were finished, still more in the sixties of the last century.

It was a state of things which the artist nature rebelled against, as, not in identical but in similar circumstances, Keats had rebelled. A whole tribe of young men, to whom Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement and afterwards Morris, Burne-Jones, and others, gave expression, were weary to death of all the turmoil round subjects which (as they were presented to them at the moment) did not interest them at all, much less excite or impel them. All that Arnold. wrote about with so much intensity, all the waters of thought in which he struggled, were as little to them as all the ideas which Byron and Shelley wrote of were to Keats. They broke away from them, like Keats, into another world—a new world of beauty and art.

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Four Victorian Poets: a Study of Clough, Arnold, Rossetti and Morris/Dante Gabriel Rossetti

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