Routledge Revivals: English Poetry in the Later Nineteenth Century (1933)

B. Ifor Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351386159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1933, this study, which underwent revision in the 1960s, is a comprehensive survey of the verse of English nineteenth-century poets whose work appeared after 1860. A special feature is the full and critical treatment of minor writers. In no other book is their work so carefully evaluated. There is a full account of the minor Pre-Raphaelites, of James Thomson, the poet of The City of Dreadful Night, of Henley, Stevenson and George MacDonald. John Davidson is the subject of a long and revealing study. Evans suggests that poetry from the late nineteenth century is neglected in scholarly study, and that Victorian Romanticism deserves more attention than it has recently received.

1
Dante Gabriel Rossetti

At times a writer appears whose significance extends beyond his work or its intrinsic merit. He establishes himself, by a strength of personality, in a symbolic relation to his time, and his influence permeates his contemporaries and successors. This power, which Coleridge once possessed, is the commanding characteristic of Dante Gabriel Rossetti¹ (1828-1882). Through him the changing values in Victorian poetry become apparent, and around him are the men who divert poetry from the purposes and motives employed by Tennyson and Browning and Matthew Arnold. Not that Rossetti occupied himself in any sterile attack on Tennyson and Browning, for he admired Tennyson’s early work, and he imitated Browning, but when his mind and creative power came to their maturity he found that he was working in a different way. Whatever may be true of painting, the Pre-Raphaelite movement in poetry is little more than the emergence of Rossetti, a fiery, disruptive mind, sometimes disordered, but always stimulating young writers to new poetic methods.

His whole tradition was fresh. The grandfather was an Italian blacksmith of Vasto. His father, Gabriele Rossetti,² driven out of Naples by the despotism of Ferdinand, spent his exile in England teaching Italian and indicating an anti-papal significance to the Divina Commedia. Thus Dante Gabriel had grown up outside the traditions of English life. His mother was a sister of that erratic physician, John William Polidori, a member of one of those human menageries that accompanied Byron on his continental travels. English life and even the traditional approach to English literature were to Rossetti of strangeness all compact. The one unity to which he gave passionate loyalty was that of his own family. Born in 1828, and christened Gabriel Charles Dante, he was one of four children; Maria, the eldest (b. 1827), became a nun in an Anglican order; William Michael (b. 1829) was the dull but exhaustive chronicler of the family; in December 1830 Christina was born, the last of the children, whose births all date within three years and ten months.

While the background of his life was Italian, it was a background he never saw. He visited France and Belgium, but never set foot in Italy. Catholicism lay in his past and rose at times with its symbolism to colour his poetry. He assimilated the aesthetic possibilities of Catholic ritual and legend without being affected by the faith. His mother’s devout Protestantism dominated the home, but left him untouched. His father’s life had been sacrificed to political conviction, and the Charlotte Street house was once illuminated with the presence of Mazzini, but to the problems of politics and social institutions Rossetti remained indifferent. He discovered his own world in poetry and pictorial art and there he found complete occupation. Had he been captured before adolescence by the traditional machinery of education he might have evolved into a foreign-looking Englishman, not too indistinguishable from the pattern, and possessing the right opinions and the right prejudices. He escaped. He had irregular tuition, first at a day school of indifferent merits, and later (1837-1843) at King’s College School and at King’s College, where his father was a Professor of Italian. This education, combined with his father’s instruction and the services of a German tutor, left him ignorant of many things, but preserved a mind passionately free for its own devotions. Freedom was his privilege, but an absence of discipline was the penalty: it left a telling mark on his painting; it smudged and blurred a number of his poems. Millais, who had the discipline without the genius, comments on one of his drawings: ‘A very clever and original design, beautifully executed … chairs out of perspective’, and his brother, William Michael, adds the laconic comment that Gabriel never mastered perspective nor paid much attention to it.

After certain preliminary instruction in painting, Rossetti entered himself in 1846 as a student in the antique schools of the Royal Academy, but the restlessness which dominated his life soon became apparent, and in March 1848 he wrote to Ford Madox Brown for permission to become his pupil. Brown, a young man of 27, accepted the young stranger and set him to work on still-life themes (‘pickle-jars and bottles’), a sobering discipline, which Rossetti considered as little better than the Academy Schools. Chafing for a freer atmosphere where accomplishment could be achieved without restrictions, he was attracted by the work of Holman Hunt, who was then only 21. With the impetuousness which marks his every action at this period, Rossetti called on Hunt and asked him plaintively if pickle-jars were an essential preliminary to painting. Hunt decided that they were not, and Rossetti was allowed to struggle with original compositions in oils, early among which was The Girlhood of the Virgin Mary. Of all his painter associates Hunt was the most generous and suffered later more than any member of the group in his struggle for recognition. He introduced Rossetti to Millais, the brilliant boy of mid-Victorian painting, who had exhibited in the Academy at 17 and who now at the mature age of 19 years was settling down to a career of artistic prosperity.

Such were the three young men who set before themselves the task of founding a new movement to reform English painting. It is probable that all they wished at first was to associate with one another, to strengthen their common belief in the high purposes of their art. Millais, the most facile and the most shallow, pampered and successful, had more technical skill than the others with less imaginative insight. Hunt, sincere and slow, firm in his convictions, and with a keen religious faith, clung to his conception of Pre-Raphaelitism long after the others had lost touch with the movement. Rossetti knew little of painting and less of the history of art, but with his great forehead, his delicate tapering fingers, his deep voice and large sensuous eyes, he was a figure that easily commanded leadership. A vague association was not enough for him; his Italian tradition suggested closer alliances, and so he combined the knowledge of his associates with his own purposes and enthusiasms to form a sort of secret society, a Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with definite principles and methods of work.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed in 1848, was by 1851 largely disbanded. Men of such varied temperaments could not long agree, nor was Rossetti an easy or even a fair associate. The fact that the movement ended in discord has led to confusing accounts of its purposes. In most general terms it was a revolt against contemporary English art as represented by the Academy. The simplest and clearest statements are those of William Michael Rossetti, who acted as major-domo to the group, and of Ruskin, who championed it, partly because he thought that its principles were rather like his own.³ W. M. Rossetti enumerates⁴ the objects of the Brotherhood: (l) To have genuine ideas to express; (2) to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them; (3) to sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote; (4) to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues. Ruskin in his famous Times letter of 13 May 1850, explained more critically what he believed Pre-Raphaelite aims to be. ‘The Pre-Raphaelites (I cannot congratulate them on common-sense in the choice of a nom de guerre) do not desire or pretend in any way to imitate antique painting as such. They know very little of antique paintings who suppose the works of these young artists to resemble them. As far as I can judge of their aim - for as I said, I do not know the men themselves - the Pre-Raphaelites intend to surrender no advantage which the knowledge or the invention of the present time can afford to their art. They intend to return to early days in this one particular only - that, as far as in them lies, they will draw either what they see or what they suppose might have been the actual facts of the scene they desire to represent, irrespective of any conventional rules of picture-making; and they have chosen their unfortunate, though not inaccurate, name, because all artists did this before Raphael’s time, and after Raphael’s time did not this, but sought to paint fair pictures rather than represent stern facts; of which the consequence has been that from Raphael’s time to this day historical art has been in acknowledged decadence.’ It is for the students of English art to determine the importance of the movement in the history of English painting. Even if its principles were wrong, or even if the pictures produced failed to conform to the principles, it served at least to awaken in English minds a recognition that painting was an art of importance, not an appendage to household decoration, or a substitute for fiction.

The term Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood would not enter into the history of English poetry except for two accidents: first, Rossetti was a poet, and had been engaged in writing verse from his earliest days as a painter, and secondly, he was fortunate in influencing forward minds in poetry as well as in painting. Yet little of his own work, or of that of his associates, conforms to the principles set out by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. As has been already suggested, the Pre-Raphaelite movement in poetry is little more than an inconvenient synonym for Rossetti’s personal influence. The Brotherhood itself had a brief literary venture in a periodical named The Germ; it first appeared in January 1850, and after two numbers it was renamed Art and Poetry; it ceased with the fourth issue in April 1850. Its policy was never clearly defined, but it served as a means for the publication of Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel and often other poems, and of his prose narrative Hand and Soul. Christina Rossetti also contributed verse, and here appeared, too, an early draft of Thomas Woolner’s My Beautiful Lady, and work by Coventry Patmore.

It was one of Rossetti’s most barren projects that brought him seven years later (1857) into contact with two younger men whom he was to influence, and with the woman Jane Burden, later Morris’s wife, who so profoundly affected his life. He had undertaken to adorn the Debating Hall (now the Library) of the Union at Oxford with frescoes painted by himself and his friends. Among his pupils was a young Oxford man, Edward Burne-Jones, whom he had persuaded to abandon regular undergraduate studies for painting. Burne-Jones brought to his notice one of his own set, a stocky, thick-set, bearded fellow, William Morris, who had already written poems. As they worked on these Arthurian frescoes, which damp and the fumes of naked gas-jets were soon to obliterate, there came to Rossetti an undergraduate from Balliol with Birkbeck Hill to introduce him as Algernon Charles Swinburne. So Rossetti met two men to whose creative powers he was to give keen impetus. They both developed to produce work that is widely different from his, and neither of them is Pre-Raphaelite as the term was understood in 1848, but, like Rossetti himself, they brought fresh elements into the poetry of the century.

Rossetti’s published work is contained in three volumes - The Early Italian Poets (1861) (republished as Dante and his Circle, 1874); Poems (1870) (republished 1881); Ballads and Sonnets (1881). In 1886 W. M. Rossetti published The Works (reissued in an enlarged edition in 1911), with a number of additional pieces not previously published. In 1930 The Ballad of Jan Van Hunks, an early piece revised later, was published. The information which chronology presents is frequently misleading: it does not necessarily bear a close relationship to that secret time sequence formed by the ordering in the mind of imaginative experience. With Rossetti the dates of volume publication bear often little relation to the period of actual composition, and in pursuing this difference one comes into contact with the intimate side of his life. In 1850 one of Rossetti’s friends, Walter Deverell, had seen in a London milliner’s shop a young woman assistant of exceptional beauty, named Elizabeth Siddal,¹ whose features have become known as one of the types which Rossetti repainted with unwearying tenacity. Miss Siddal was beautiful, but not robust; probably even when Rossetti first knew her she was consumptive. No one was generally less well designed to express considerate affection than Rossetti; what he wanted he seized and used it tempestuously for his own purposes. Friends, patrons, acquaintances, all suffered from an egoism so natural that it was almost unconscious. The only exception was to come later in his solicitous care of Jane Morris. Miss Siddal was to suffer. She had sufficient talent in drawing to attract Ruskin’s approval, but her cultural background and physical strength were ill adapted to struggle with Rossetti’s fiery and irresponsible spirit. Nor was the situation simplified by Rossetti’s encounter in 1857 with Jane Burden, later Mrs William Morris, who exercised a deep influence upon him. The view may be reasonably held that he married Elizabeth Siddal from a sense of obligation at a time when he was already in love with Jane. His treatment of her may well have been affected by this complication in his emotional life. His marriage to Elizabeth was delayed until 1860, and in 1861 she gave birth to a stillborn child. In 1862, suffering equally from phthisis and from Rossetti’s neglect, she took an excessive dose of laudanum and died. The balance of evidence must lead to the conclusion that she committed suicide, that Rossetti knew this and that he was deeply remorseful, though remorse, like other emotions, could not hold him with any consistency. Overcome by his immediate grief, he placed the manuscript of his poems, as a gesture of expiation, in her coffin. It is difficult to stand in judgement over such actions, which viewed dispassionately may seem emotional quixotism. But, as Meredith could have told Rossetti, the price of sentiment is a high one. Rossetti discovered it to be excessive. Urged by numerous friends, he was led in 1869 to gain Home Office permission to disinter the poems, which he used in preparing the 1870 volume. Part of the price to be paid for Rossetti’s excursion into sentiment lies in the difficulty of chronology in his poetry. His first volume, apart from the Italian translations, was published in 1870, but the poems it contained belong mainly to the periods 1847-1853 and 1868-1870.

While these spectacular moments in his life are associated with Elizabeth Siddal, Janey Morris had a much deeper influence. Like Elizabeth, she was of humble origins, the daughter of an Oxford groom. Rossetti met her, in October 1857, when she was still Jane Burden in an Oxford theatre. She was then a girl of 17, and two years later she married William Morris. Some have said that Rossetti urged Morris to marry her in order to keep ‘Janey’ in the circle. Morris is so reticent, so honourable, that no open comment on this complex relationship is to be found among his records, but it is clear that his estrangement from Rossetti derived largely from this source. As a model for Rossetti’s painting, as an influence on his poetry, as a companion and a lover, she had a dominance for some of the most important years of his life. The complete story of their relationship is still unrevealed, but it is clear now that many of his letters to her are available,¹ that, unlike most of those who met her, he discovered in her not only a most beautiful woman of the Pre-Raphaelite character, but an intelligent companion with whom he could discuss his pictures and his problems. He seems to have married Elizabeth Siddal, as has been suggested, because he felt committed to her; his obsessive love for ‘Janey’ came from the fact that he was more happy in her company than with any other human person. He was continuously concerned for her health, and her well-being, and, galling though it must have been to Morris, when the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., broke up, Rosse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 Dante Gabriel Rossetti
• 2 Algernon Charles Swinburne
• 3 Christina Georgina Rossetti
• 4 William Morris
• 5 Minor Pre-Raphaelite Poets: William Bell Scott, William Allingham, Thomas Woolner, Arthur O’Shaughnessy, John Payne, Philip Bourke Marston, William Sharp (Fiona MacLeod)
• 6 Coventry Patmore and Allied Poets: Coventry Patmore, Francis Thompson, Mrs Alice Meynell
• 7 George Meredith
• 8 Thomas Hardy
• 9 James Thomson
• 10 Robert Bridges and his Associates: Canon Dixon, Mary Coleridge; Digby Mackworth Dolben; Robert Bridges
• 11 Gerard Manley Hopkins
• 12 Lighter Verse: Austin Dobson, Edmund Gosse, Andrew Lang; Comic and Nonsense Verse: Edward Lear, ‘Lewis Carroll’, William Schwenck Gilbert, Charles Stuart Calverley, James Kenneth Stephen
• 13 Minor Poets: I: George MacDonald; Robert Buchanan; David Gray, Gerald Massey, Alexander Anderson, Joseph Skipsey
• 14 Minor Poets: II
• 15 William Ernest Henley and Robert Louis Stevenson
• 16 John Davidson
• 17 Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and the Poetry of the Eighteen-Nineties
• 18 Rudyard Kipling
• 19 Alfred Edward Housman
• NOTES
• INDEX