The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day/Chapter 6
VI.
Pearls from the Amatory Poets.
I have thus carefully gone through Mr. Rossetti's poetry, not because it is by any means the best or worst verse of its kind, but because, being avowedly "mature," and having had the benefit of many years' revision, it is perhaps more truly representative of its class than the grosser verse of Mr. Swinburne, or the more careless and fluent verse of Mr. Morris. The main charge I bring against poetry of this kind is its sickliness and effeminacy; but if there be any truth in my own Theory of Literary Morality, as enunciated some years ago in the Fortnightly Review, the charge of indecency need not be pressed at all, as it is settled by the fact of artistic and poetic incompetence. The morality of any book is determinable by its value as literature—immoral writing proceeding primarily from insincerity of vision, and therefore being betokened by all those signs which enable us to ascertain the value of art as art. In the present case the matter is ludicrously simple; for we perceive that the silliness and the insincerity come, not by nature, but at second hand; Mr. Rossetti and Mr. Swinburne being the merest echoes—strikingly original in this—that they merely echo what is vile, while other imitators reproduce what is admirable. I am loath in this connection to incriminate Mr. Morris. That gentleman is so prolific, so fertile in resources, and is generally so innocent (despite the ever-present undertone of fleshliness), that he may fairly be left to his laurels. He is open to the same literary criticism as the others, but, while often ingenuous, is never altogether unclean.
It may be interesting for the reader to compare, in a brief glance, the various poets of the Italian-English school with each other. To do so thoroughly would involve the serious task of perusing three-fourths of the forgotten English poets; for, since weeds ever grew quicker than flowers, the bulk of the poetic trash left behind by successive generations of verse-writers, from Surrey to Spratt, far outweighs the little collection of true poetry which may justly be esteemed classic and unimpeachable. But it may be observed here that all the poets of this school, though their name be legion, write very much alike. They are generally affected, and often nasty. “All that regards design, form, fable (which is the soul of poetry), all that concerns exactness or consent of parts (which is the body), will probably be wanting: only pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse (which are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry), may be found in their verses. Their colouring entertains the sight, but the lines and life are not to be inspected too narrowly.” Such is Pope’s criticism on Crashaw, and it will apply to any one of the school, certainly to Mr. Swinburne or Mr. Rossetti.
It need cause no wonder that verse-writers of this sort find admirers in proportion to their shallowness and affectation. This has been the case from the beginning, and it is the case now. The poems and plays of the egregious Cartwright, published in 1651, are preceded by panegyrics from all the wits of the time, no less than fifty in number, quite in the style of the Fleshly School and its Critics. Donne was the pride of collegians. Cowley was actually considered the glory and the wonder of his generation. Nowadays the anonymous press is a tremendous check on this sort of humbug, but there still linger old-fashioned journals with strings in the hands of a clique.[1] It is the interest of educated persons and schoolmen to exalt all artificial products, for they themselves can fairly hope to rival the stuff they praise and to get some sort of a position. If hothouse plants are in favour, any clever young fellow from a university can force them. And it thus happens that the Fleshly School, without ever reaching the general public, is in favour with the literary amateurs who yearly swarm from college, and ruin the profession of literature by writing anywhere and everywhere free of charge.
From time immemorial, poets of the Artificial School have written in the same way, and been admired for the same tricks; and indeed our modern poets can stand no comparison, even in subtle grossness, with their progenitors. Here are Cowley's lines on a paper written in juice of lemon, and read by the fire:—
"Nothing yet in thee is seen;
But when a genial heat warms thee within,
A new-born wood of various lines there grows,
Here buds an L, and there a B,
Here spouts a V, and there a T,
And all the flourishing letters stand in rows;"
which the reader may advantageously compare with Mr. Rossetti's description of a love-letter in p. 198 of his volume. The master above quoted, in his "Davideis," has the following awful passage:—
"The sun himself started with sudden fright,
To see his beams return so dismal light!"
This is performing a miracle certainly, but Mr. Rossetti performs a greater—he makes the "Silence" speak:—
"But therewithal the tremulous Silence said:
'Lo, Love yet bids thy lady,'" &c. (Page 206.)
Thus sings, or screams, Mr. Swinburne:—
"Ah, that my lips were tuneless lips, but pressed
To the bruised blossom of thy scourged white breast!
Ah, that my mouth, for Muses' milk, were fed
On the sweet blood thy sweet small wounds had bled!
That with my tongue I felt them and could taste
The faint flakes from thy bosom to the waist!
That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat
Thy breasts like honey."
Dr. Donne, however, had anticipated him in the same vein:—
"As the sweet sweat of roses in a still,
As that, which from chaf'd muskats' pores doth trill,
As the almighty balm of the early east,
Such are the sweat drops of my mistress' breast;
And on her neck her skin such lustre sets,
They seem no sweat drops, but pearl coronets."
These poets ever delight in the strangest and most far-fetched comparisons. Cleveland has a magnificent comparison of the sun to a coal-pit; but Rossetti, twenty times more cunning and subtle, sees that "vows" are the merest bricks:—
"We strove
To build with fire-tried vows the piteous home
Which memory haunts." (Page 208.)
Cowley compares his heart to a hand-grenado; in a similar spirit, Rossetti compares the Soul to a town, and (bent to hunt the simile to death) tells us that there are by-streets there, and that Hopes go about hunting for adventures at the public-houses!—
"So through that soul in restless brotherhood,
They roam together now, and wind among
It's bye-streets, knocking at the dusty inns!" (Page 231.)
Dr. John Donne is great on Tears: they are at one time "globes, nay worlds," containing their "Europe, Asia, and Africa;" and at another they are "wine," bottled "in crystal vials" for the tipple of lovers. Mr. Rossetti, in a semi-military spirit, thus describes a Moan:—
"A moan, the sighing wind's auxiliary!"
Quite in the spirit of Mr. Rossetti's fleshlier and commoner manner, in which he talks about his lady's hand teaching "memory to mock desire," is Cowley's exquisite meditation, addressed to his mistress:—
"Though in thy thoughts scarce any tracts have been
So much as of original sin,
Such charms thy beauty wears, as might
Desires in dying saints excite!"
This is the way Dr. John Donne writes in the beginning of the seventeenth century:—
"Are not thy kisses, then, as filthy, and more,
As a worm sucking an envenom'd sore?
Doth not thy fearful hand in feeling quake,
As one which gathering flowers still fears a snake?"
Could anything more closely resemble the horrible manner of Mr. Swinburne's "Anactoria?" It is difficult to believe that our present school of poets have not drunk deep at the muddy Aganippe of their predecessors here in England, as well as at the poetic fountain polluted by the influx of the Parisian sewers. There is a coincidence of affectation in the following parallel passages:—
THE TROJAN HORSE.
"A mother, I was without mother born,
In end, all arm'd, my father I brought forth!"—Drummond.
"That horse, within whose populous womb
The birth was death."—Rossetti (p. 229).
Again, Mr. Rossetti, in Sonnet XXIX., compares Life to "a Lady" with whom he wandered from the "haunts of men," finding "all bowers amiss" (!) till he came to a place "where only woods and waves could hear our kiss," and who, as an awful result, bare him three children, Love, Song—
"Whose hair
Blew like a flame and blossomed like a wreath,
And Art, whose eyes were worlds by God found fair."[2]
Nearly as absurd, but less subtle and harassing, is the passage in Drummond's "Hymn to the Fairest Fair," wherein we have the following incarnate metaphor of no less shadowy a shape than "Providence!"—
"With faces two, like sisters, sweetly fair,
Whose blossoms no rough autumn can impair,
Stands Providence, and doth her looks disperse
Thro' every corner of the universe."
Nor must it be hastily concluded that Mr. Rossetti's "apples meet for the mouth" simile is quite original. Drummond in one passage calls his mistresses' hearts
"Fruits of Paradise,
Celestial cherries that so sweetly smell;"
and in another—the following sonnet—comes tremendously close upon the best modern manner, minus the "lipping" and the "munching:"—
"Who hath not seen into her saffron bed
The morning's goddess mildly her repose,
Or her of whose pure blood first sprang the rose
Lull'd in a slumber by a myrtle shade?
Who hath not seen that sleeping white and red
Makes Phœbe look so pale, which she did close
In that Ionian hall to ease her woes,
Which only lives by her dear kisses fed?
Come but and see my lady sweetly sleep,
The sighing rubies of those heavenly lips,
The Cupids which breasts' golden apples keep,
Those eyes which shine in midst of their eclipse;
And he them all shall see, perhaps and prove
She waking but persuadeth, now forceth love."
I have quoted this poem entire, because it is quite in the modern spirit, and would certainly, if printed in either Mr. Swinburne's or Mr. Rossetti's poems, have been considered beautiful; and partly because I should like the reader to compare it with the Swinburnian conception of "Love and Sleep, as known to the moderns:"—
"Lying asleep between the strokes of night
I saw my love lean over my sad bed,
Pale as the duskiest lily's leaf or head,
Smooth-skinned and dark with bare throat made to bite!
Too wan for blushing and too warm for white,
But perfect coloured without white or red;
And her lips opened amorously, and said—
I wist not what, saving one word—Delight!
And all her face was honey to my mouth,
And all her body pasture to mine eyes;
The long lithe arms and hotter hands than fire,
The quivering flanks, hair smelling of the south,
The bright light feet, the splendid supple thighs,
And glittering eyelids of my soul's desire."
Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, p. 316.
The reader whom this fascinates had better turn to Dr. Donne's eighteenth elegy, every line of which might have been written in our generation, wherein the nude female is compared to a Globe for the lover's exploration, and the whole Voyage is described with a terrific realism of detail and daring strength of metaphor which would fill even Mr. Rossetti with envy and despair. It is, unfortunately, rather too strong to quote, though not a grain more filthy than the above sonnet. Let me turn, by way of disinfectant, to a conceit in the true Della Cruscan style, from Mr. Rossetti's works. A very shadowy Entity is speaking, in a poem affectedly called "A Superscription:"—
"Look in my face: my name is Might-have-been;
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell;
Unto thine ear I hold the dead sea-shell," &c. (Page 234.)
This passage, although quite in the ancient manner, was perhaps composed on one of those days when Mr. Rossetti goes poaching in Mr. Swinburne's French "Slough of Uncleanness," for we find Baudelaire making use of very similar language:—
"Trois mille six cents fois par heure, la Seconde
Chuchote: Souviens-toi! Rapide avec sa voix
D'insecte, Maintenant dit: Je suis Autrefois!"
Fleurs de Mal, p. 245.
Truly, this sort of reading is wearing to the brain!
I have already alluded more than once to the foolish fleshliness which permeates the contemporary treatment of even avowedly religious themes. For example, when Mr. Rossetti writes about the Virgin Mary, he begins in the true fantastic spirit of those older writers who spiritualised sensualism in their addresses to the Bridegroom and the Magdalen.
"Mother of the Fair Delight!"
he exclaims; and then proceeds with the following jargon:—
"Handmaid perfect in God's sight,
Now sitting fourth beside the Three,
Thyself a woman-Trinity,—
Being a daughter born to God,
Mother of Christ from stall to rood,
And Wife unto the Holy Ghost!!"
The poem improves as it proceeds, but it is fleshly to the last fibre,—quite, in fact, in the spirit of Richard Crashaw's poem on "The Weeper:"—
"What bright soft thing is this?
Sweet Mary, thy fair eyes' expence?
A moist spark it is,
A watery diamond; from whence
The very term, I think, was found,
The water of a diamond.
"O 'tis not a tear,
'Tis a star about to drop
From thine eye its sphere;
The sun will stoop and take it up,
Proud will his sister be to wear
This thine eye's jewel in her ear.
"O 'tis a tear,
Too true a tear! for no sad eyne,
How sad so e'er,
Rain so true a tear as thine;
Each drop leaving a place so dear
Weeps for itself, is its own tear.
"Such a pearl as this is
(Slipt from Aurora's dewy breast)
The rose-bud's sweet lip kisses,
And such the rose itself when vext
With ungentle flames, does shed,
Sweating in too warm a bed."
This is meant reverently, but what shall we say of Mr. Rossetti's "Love's Redemption," in which the act of sexual connection is outrageously and vilely compared to the administering of the sacramental bread and wine?—
"O thou, who at Love's hour ecstatically," &c.[3]
Compare, also, with Mr. Rossetti's pseudo-religious poems generally, those passages of Crashaw in which all the language of passion and lust is used to describe purely spiritual and religious sensations:—
"Amorous languishments, luminous trances,
Sights which are not seen with eyes,
Spiritual and soul-piercing glances;
Whose pure and subtle lightning flies
Home to the heart, and sets the house on fire;
And melts it down in sweet desire:
Yet doth not stay
To ask the windows leave to pass that way.
"Delicious deaths, soft exhalations
Of soul! dear and divine annihilations!
A thousand unknown rites
Of joys and rarified delights!"
This might have been pardonable in a Roman Catholic of Selden's time, but the echo of it in a "mature" person of the nineteenth century is positively dreadful.[4]
I close this book of the "mature" person. I close Mr. Swinburne's volumes. I try to gather some definite impression, some thought, some light, from what I have been reading. I find my mind jaded, my whole body sick and distressed, a dull pain lurking in the region of the medulla oblongata. I try to picture up Mr. Rossetti's poetry, and I am dazzled by conceits in sixteenth-century costume,—"rosy hours," "Loves" with "gonfalons," damsels with "citherns," "soft-complexioned" skies; flowers, fruits, jewels, vases, apple-blossoms, lutes: I see no gleam of nature, not a sign of humanity; I hear only the heated ravings of an affected lover, indecent for the most part, and often blasphemous. I attempt to describe Mr. Swinburne; and lo! the Bacchanal screams, the sterile Dolores sweats, serpents dance, men and women wrench, wriggle, and foam in an endless alliteration (quite in Gascoigne's manner) of heated and meaningless words, the veriest garbage of Baudelaire flowered over with the epithets of the Della Cruscans.
"One moment!" observes a candid person as I write; "the emptiness and grossness of these may be admitted; but are not these writers quite unimpeachable on the ground of poetic form, and is that not a certain merit?" Something on this head has been said already. Let it be further said that no unsound soul is clad in a sound form; and that what holds true of matter and thought holds equally true of manner and style: both may seem rapid and strong, but neither will bear five minutes' criticism. Imagine an English writer pluming himself on his careful choice of diction, and publishing such a verse as the following:—
"Nothing is better, I well think,
Than love; the hidden well-water
Is not so delicate to drink:
This was well seen of me and her."
Swinburne's Poems and Ballads.
Or this other of Mr. Rossetti:—
"In painting her I shrined her face
'Mid mystic trees, where light falls in
Hardly at all; a covert place
Where you might think to find a din
Of doubtful talk, and a live flame
Wandering, and many a shape whose name
Not itself knoweth, and old dew,
And your own footsteps meeting you,
And all things going as they came." (Page 128.)
Apart altogether from the meaninglessness, was ever writing so formally slovenly and laboriously limp? I have no time to pile example on example; I leave that task to the reader, who will not have to hunt far or long for some of the worst writing in our language. Of a piece are such expressions as, "O their glance is loftiest dole!" "in grove the gracile Spring trembles;" "her soft body, dainty thin;" "handsome Jenny mine;" "smouldering senses;" "the rustling covert of my soul;" "a little spray of tears;" "culminant changes;""wasteful warmth of tears;" "the sunset's desolate disarray;" "watered my heart's drouth;" "the wind's wellaway;" "a shaken shadow intolerable;" "that swallow's soar" (a swallow, by the way, does not soar); "my eyes, wide open, had the run of some ten weeds to rest upon;" and a thousand others, as bad or worse, all to be found in Mr. Rossetti's small volume; besides the thousands upon thousands to be found in the works of his more fruitful brethren.
It would be wasting time to criticize details so worthless, save for the purpose of showing that insincerity in one respect argues insincerity in all, and that where we find a man choosing worthless subjects and affecting trashy models, we may rely on finding his treatment, down to the tiniest detail, frivolous, absurd, and reckless. The affectation of carefulness in composition is in proportion to the affectation of subtlety of theme; and the result is a lamentable amount, not of valuable poetic form, but of sound and fury, signifying absolutely next to nothing, and as shapeless and undigested as chaos itself.
- ↑ See Notes.
- ↑ It is perhaps needless to remark the utter confusion of metaphor which makes a love-act with Life as Lady precede the birth of Love, &c. The language of this school will not bear a moment's serious investigation.
- ↑ See ante, p. 59.
- ↑ Hall, in the ninth satire of Book I., took occasion to attack this blending of incongruous ideas and symbols into affected religious verse. "Hence, ye profane!" he cried,
"—mell not with holy things,
That Sion's Muse from Palestina brings.
Parnassus is transformed to Sion Hill,
And iv'ry-palms her steep ascents done fill,
Now good St. Peter weeps pure Helicon,
And both the Maries make a music moan;
Yea, even the prophet of the heav'nly lyre,
Great Solomon, sings in the English quire,
And is become a new-found sonnetist,
Singing his love, the holy spouse of Christ,
Like as she were some light-skirts of the rest," &c.