No More Learning

For several years during his chequered career as a journalist in
London, Thomson found in Bradlaugh a steadfast friend and bene-
factor. He was for some length of time an inmate of Bradlaugh's
household, and a constant contributor of prose and verse to The
National Reformer, in the columns of which The City of Dreadful
Night made its first appearance in 1874. Thomson's career in the
army ceased in 1862, when he was dismissed because of a somewhat
trivial act of insubordination. He afterwards became a solicitor's
clerk, then secretary to a mining company in America, a war corre-
spondent in Spain, and, finally, a journalistic free-lance in London.
His later years, darkened by poverty and ill-health, largely due to
insomnia and intemperate habits, were spent in London, and he
died at University college hospital, under distressing circum-
stances, in June 1882.
Thomson was a man of genius who, in the blunt common phrase,
'went wrong. Weakness of will, and some insidious inherited
malady, accounted much more for his misfortunes than any vicious


## p. 108 (#124) ############################################

108
[ch.
James Thomson
propensity or deliberately perverse conduct. All his friends bear
testimony to the genial and sunny side of his character; kind,
courteous and chivalrous in his ways, he won the love and the
esteem of those who came into closest contact with him. 'A man,'
writes his editor and biographer, Bertram Dobell, “could hardly wish
for a better companion than he was; while as regards women there
was a charm about him which invariably made them his friends and
admirers. ' But ‘Melancholy, of. . . blackest midnight born,' marked
him for her own, and, under her baleful influence, he fell a helpless
victim to intemperance and disease. This is the first consideration
to be taken into account in any judgment of Thomson's poetry.
The City of Dreadful Night, he wrote to George Eliot, ‘was the
outcome of much sleepless hypochondria. ' It is not the utterance
of a sane mind; but, whatever one may think about the sanity of
the poem, nobody can fail to recognise, and feel, its sincerity.
Human life, on Thomson's experience and interpretation of it,
was one long ‘all-disastrous fight against a blind destiny. The
infinite pathos and the pain of the self-sacrificing souls who,
throughout the ages, had 'striven to alleviate our lot, did not
seem to him to have ‘availed much against the primal curse of our
existence. '
It is strange to find that, of all English poets, the one who in-
fluenced this latter-day prophet of despair most was he who sang of
the indomitable hope that
creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.
Next to him, among his literary favourites, came, perhaps,
Heine, many of whose lyrics he has finely translated, and
the arch-optimist Browning. Thomson's admiration for Shelley
is indicated by the pseudonym ‘Bysshe Vanolis '--the latter part
being an anagram of Novalis, another of his chosen authors-under
which, using generally only the initials B. V. , he wrote many of his
contributions to The National Reformer and other periodicals.
Of both Browning and Shelley he wrote some admirable prose
critiques, which, with other things of the kind, attest not only
Thomson's catholicity of literary taste and sympathy but his acute
insight and sound judgment as a critic. His studies of Ben Jonson,
Blake, John Wilson, James Hogg, Walt Whitman, Heine and others
-many of them originally written for The Secularist, and for
that most intellectual of tobacconists' advertising journals, Cope's
Tobacco Plant-constitute a budget of prose criticism which even
the leading lights of the greater reviews might have been proud


## p. 109 (#125) ############################################

IV] The City of Dreadful Night 109
to own. Nor is it fair to judge the range and variety of his poetical
powers by The City of Dreadful Night alone. His collected
poems form, in mere substance and extent, a very considerable
literary legacy, and prove that he could sing in many a key. The
two separate volumes of poetry published just before his death-The
City of Dreadful Night and other Poems (1880) and Vane's Story
and other Poems (1881 [1880])—contain nearly all his best work.
In these volumes, poems like To Our Ladies of Death, a finely
conceived little phantasy “suggested,' in the author's words, ' by
the sublime sisterhood of Our Ladies of Sorrow' in the Suspiria de
Profundis of De Quincey; an oriental tale called Weddah and
Om-el-Bonain; Vane's Story, a personal confession, well exhibit
his range of interests and his skill as a versifier. Among poems
otherwise published should be noted his tribute to Shelley (1861),
and Insomnia (1882)—a fitting pendant, in its terror and gloom,
to The City of Dreadful Night. As a lyric poet, Thomson ranks
high, and every thoughtful reader of his lighter verse will have
little patience with those who assert that the most depress-
ing of his poems is his only title to literary distinction. Two
poems, in particular, have often, and deservedly, been singled out
as delightful examples of his lighter vein-Sunday up the River
and Sunday at Hampstead, both 'genuine idyls of the people,' as
his friend, Philip Bourke Marston called them, ‘charged with
brightness and healthy joy in living. ' The weakness of most of
Thomson's verse, with all his metrical skill and his astonishing
command of rime, lies in its carelessness, not to say slovenliness,
of execution, and in a constant tendency to fall into a hard and
glittering rhetoric, reminiscent of Byron at his worst. When all
is told, however, The City of Dreadful Night, with its 'inspissated
gloom,' inevitably remains his most haunting and powerful pro-
duction-a poetical monument well nigh unique in its sombre and
awe-inspiring splendour. It is a poem that takes no account of
such pleasant theories as Matthew Arnold's, that the right art
is that alone which creates the highest enjoyment. But he
would be a bold man who denied the right of utterance, even in
poetry, to feelings so intense and real as those which tore and
tortured the heart of James Thomson.
6


## p. 110 (#126) ############################################

CHAPTER V
THE ROSSETTIS, WILLIAM MORRIS, SWINBURNE
AND OTHERS
I
In 1848, a number of young artists and men of letters, united
in opposition to conventional systems of artistic teaching, formed
themselves into a circle to which they gave the name 'the pre-
Raphaelite brotherhood. The painters William Holman Hunt and
John Everett Millais, who were originally responsible for the idea,
were joined by five others. Of these, Dante Gabriel, originally
called Gabriel Charles Dante, Rossetti, then in his twentieth year,
was best fitted to express the aims of the coterie by his posses-
sion of the double gift of poetry and painting and by the power
of a singularly masterful personality. Thomas Woolner, sculptor
and poet, William Michael Rossetti, the younger brother of
Gabriel, Frederick George Stephens and James Collinson were the
remaining four. To these might be added the names of several
sympathisers who, though in close communion with the brother-
hood, were not of it. Among elder men, Ford Madox Brown
became one of the most thorough exponents of its aims in painting.
William Bell Scott and Coventry Patmore gave it their help, and
it found an ardent champion in Ruskin, who used his persuasive
eloquence to define pre-Raphaelism and vindicate it against the
charges of mere imitation and relapse into medievalism.
The term “pre-Raphaelite’ implied merely a kinship of method
with artists whose direct influence upon the work of the brother-
hood was relatively small. Rossetti, though of Italian parentage
and closely acquainted with Italian literature, was a Londoner
born and bred, who had no first-hand knowledge of Italian
art in its native country. Of him and his friends, Ruskin
said that they ‘imitate no pictures : they paint from nature
only. Their passion for rendering nature as she is, in obedience
to their sense of truth, was instinctive: it was pre-Raphaelite
only in so far as their practice found authority in the
fidelity to nature of the later medieval painters, which was


## p. 111 (#127) ############################################

CH. V]
The Germ
III
abandoned by the followers of Raffaelle. When, on 1 January
1850, the first number of The Germ: Thoughts towards Nature
in Poetry, Literature and Art was published, the brotherhood
formulated its artistic creed, in a manifesto printed on the cover
of the magazine, as' an entire adherence to the simplicity of art. '
The contents illustrated a strict obedience to this principle.
Graphic art was represented only by Holman Hunt's etching in
illustration of Woolner's poems My Beautiful Lady and Of my
Lady in Death ; but Rossetti's poem My Sister's Sleep, afterwards
subjected to much revision and alteration, successfully combined
realistic description with pictorial effect, and his mystical prose
narrative Hand and Soul gave evidence of his understanding of
the spirit of the painters in whose work he found the closest
response to his own ideals.
A creed held so earnestly as that of the pre-Raphaelite brother-
hood easily lends itself to over-serious expression. Sonnets and
lyrics, interspersed with didactic essays and laboured critiques, do
not suffice as the material of a successful periodical ; and the poetry
of The Germ was too novel, its prose too conscientious, to attract
general admiration. In the third number, its title was changed to
Art and Poetry: being Thoughts towards Nature, and it was
announced as conducted principally by artists. After the fourth
number, it ceased to appear. Apart from Rossetti's Hand and
,
Soul, the style of which is remarkably mature and full of the
romantic imagination and depth of colour noticeable in his
paintings, the prose of The Germ is almost negligible. Its verse
is by no means of equal value, and some of it was experimental
work by persons of no special poetic talent. The eminence of
some of its promoters and contributors is enough to give it
historical value as an attempt to apply an extremely rigid canon
to varying forms of art. But its literary importance is almost
entirely due to the eleven poems by Rossetti himself and the
seven lyrics by his sister Christina, two years his junior, which it
contained. In the case of Rossetti, My Sister's Sleep was written
in close adherence to the truth of detail demanded by the pre-
Raphaelite creed. The subject, however, the peaceful death of a
girl at midnight on Christmas eve, amid a quiet broken only by
common sounds and the striking of the church clock, while the
scene outside is bathed in cold moonlight, is invested with the
mysticism and romance which were an inalienable part of Rossetti's
thought. Conversely, The Blessed Damozel, the first version of
which appeared in the second number of The Germ, applies


## p. 112 (#128) ############################################

II2
[CH.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
realistic touches to a subject which is primarily mystical and
romantic. His remaining contributions to The Germ were chiefly
reminiscences of a tour with Holman Hunt in Belgium, and
included six sonnets on pictures by Memling and other painters.
Pax Vobis, now called World's Worth, written in the church of
Saint-Bavon at Ghent, indicates, like the later Ave, Rossetti's
sensitiveness to the charm of ritual and historical doctrine from
which art has derived much of its highest inspiration.
During the ten years that followed the publication of The
Germ, Rossetti published little poetry, devoting himself chiefly to
painting. It was about 1850 that he met the beautiful Elizabeth
Eleanor Siddal, who permanently inspired his painting and poetry
alike. They became engaged to be married ; but, owing to want of
money and to Miss Siddal's weak health, their marriage did not
take place till 1860. In 1861, Rossetti published his first volume,
The Early Italian Poets, rearranged, at a later date, under the
title Dante and his Circle. This was a series of translations,
including a prose version of La Vita Nuova, from Dante and his
thirteenth-century precursors and from his friends and con-
temporaries. Meanwhile, Rossetti had contributed to The Oxford
and Cambridge Magazine in 1856 three poems, The Burden of
Nineveh, a new version of The Blessed Damozel and The Staff and
Scrip. Of his influence over Morris and the other contributors
to this publication more will be said later. Other poems written
during this period were copied into a manuscript book, which,
when his wife died in 1862, was buried with her. He died at
Birchington near Margate on 9 April 1882 and was buried in the
churchyard of the parish church.
Poems by D. G. Rossetti, his first volume of strictly original
poetry, was published in 1870. Most of the contents of this book,
which included some of the sonnet-sequence afterwards called The
House of Life, had lain undisturbed in his wife's grave in Highgate
cemetery since 1862, and it was with great difficulty that he was
persuaded to consent to their disinterment, and the publication
of pieces which were known only in oral versions. Ballads and
Sonnets in 1881 completed The House of Life, and, among other
poems, added Rose Mary, The White Ship and The King's
Tragedy to his work. The volume of his verse, even when his
translations are added to it, is comparatively small, and his pro-
ductiveness was restrained by fastidious habits of revision, by
which the text of whole poems such as The Blessed Damozel was
materially altered.


## p. 113 (#129) ############################################

v]
The Blessed Damozel
113
6
The influences which formed Rossetti's style were complex. The
elements of romance and mysticism in his nature were too strong
to be curbed by the preciseness of delineation which his pre-
Raphaelite creed required. Reference has already been made to
the conflict between natural inclination and artistic principle in
My Sister's Sleep and The Blessed Damozel. The setting of The
Blessed Damozel, 'the rampart of God's house over which the
immortal maiden, in her longing for the lover whom she has left
on earth, leans down towards ‘the tides of day and night,' tran-
scends the power of realistic narrative. For the contrast between
'the fixed place of Heaven' and the planets in time and space, for
the procession of souls ‘mounting up to God,' for the fluttering of
the moon in the gulf below the golden rampart, simile has to be
invoked. The boldness of imagination which likens the moon in
space to 'a curled feather' comes dangerously near grotesqueness,
80 material is the image employed to define an object of tran-
scendental vision. On the other hand, the comparison of the
revolving earth to a 'fretful midge' is a master-stroke of daring;
that of the mounting souls to 'thin flames' is absolutely unforced;
and the phrase in which the Blessed Damozel sees
Time like a pulse shake fierce
Through all the worlds
is a triumphant attempt to figure forth the indescribable, which
was kept without alteration through all the versions of the poem.
In the later stanzas, which celebrate the joys of paradise, details
are particularised with a clearness of sense and fullness of melody
which give to every word a visible and audible value; but the power
and beauty of the poet's work are at their height, not in the even
flow of the rapture in which he translates heavenly pleasures into
earthly terms, but in the occasional sublimity of the opening
visions which defy direct description.
The Blessed Damozel is without a counterpart in English
poetry; for the ecstasy of such poems as Crashaw's Hymn to the
Name and Honor of. . . Sainte Teresa and The Flaming Heart, in
which sensuous imagery is used to express celestial delight, is
founded upon a definitely religious enthusiasm. Rossetti, on the
other hand, although brought up in a religious atmosphere, and
retaining a deep reverence for Christian tradition, regarded religion
primarily from an aesthetic point of view. He was a mystic; but
his mysticism did not take the form of a spiritual exaltation to
which the beauty of earth is subordinate : it was a perception of
the undefinable unearthly quality which adds an attraction to
8
E. L. XIII.
CH. V.


## p. 114 (#130) ############################################

I14
Dante Gabriel Rossetti [ch.
earthly beauty, supplying, as it does, a glimpse of things distant
and unattainable. In this respect, the poet to whom he was most
nearly akin was Keats, whose sense of beauty of form and colour
he shared to the full. The influence of Keats is felt in many ways
in the poetry of the nineteenth century; but his profuseness of
detail appealed to no poets so thoroughly as to those whose
sympathies had been attracted by pre-Raphaelite doctrine. Such
poems as The Eve of St Agnes were the immediate ancestors of
the poetry of The Germ. The wild night through which Porphyro
came across the moors, the throbbing music, the carven angels on
the cornice, the moonbeams shining through the stained windows,
the wind-shaken arras in the hall, are described by Keats with an
accuracy and a sensuous appreciation of every detail which makes
the whole scene present to the reader, but, also, with an added
mystery which stimulates his sense of the romantic and unfamiliar.
Rossetti, however, was not successful in combining the magic
element with the purely descriptive side of his art in this way.
Powerfully affected as he was by Keats's methods of description,
his strength as it developed did not lie in informing old-world
stories of love and passion with a heightened charm of romance.
In The Bride's Prelude, an unfinished poem upon a singularly
painful theme, realistic description is used with a completeness
which excludes all mystery. The contrast between the glare of
the hot summer day without, and the half-darkness of the room in
which the bride and her sister await the wedding, the fitful sounds
breaking the silence amid which Aloyse falters out her secret
to the horror-stricken Amelotte, are incidents which, felt and
pictured with a vivid intensity, stand out in relief from the
surface of a somewhat prolix story, of whose weaknesses Rossetti
himself became conscious as he proceeded. His imagination
needed a stimulus from the supernatural for complete success in
narrative. It was quickened by ballad-poetry and its tales of
witchcraft, love-philtres and such accessories of tragedy. The
directness and simplicity of the ballad were not within the range
of his genius, of which the love of ornament was an essential
quality ; but he achieved something of its swiftness and vigour in
The White Ship and The King's Tragedy. Although the super-
natural plays no direct part in the story of The White Ship, the
fate which presides over the action is clearly expressed by the
thrice repeated stanza at the beginning, middle and end of the
poem, with its double refrain, a comment upon the insecurity of
earthly power. The King's Tragedy, on the other hand, is full of


## p. 115 (#131) ############################################

v]
Sister Helen and Rose Mary
I15
sinister and foreboding incident to herald the fatal climax.
Twice, by the Scotish Sea' and in the Charterhouse at Perth, the
spae-wife warns the king of her recurring vision of the shroud
that gradually envelops his phantom form, and, as the tragedy
nears its consummation, the moonlit shield of Scotland in the
window pane is blackened by an obscuring cloud.
Rossetti's highest achievements in giving dramatic effect to the
blending of romantic narrative with supernatural atmosphere are
Sister Helen, one of his earlier poems, and Rose Mary, which
belongs to his later work. The subjects are, to some extent, com-
plementary. In Sister Helen, the woman who works out her
revenge by destroying the waxen image of her lover dooms her
soul by her own act. In Rose Mary, the centre of the poem is
the magic beryl into which the heroine's sin admits a band of evil
spirits. Her resolute breaking of the beryl and the death of her
body free her soul from destruction. The tale of Sister Helen
is suggested rather than told. Each of the forty-two stanzas
adheres to a rigid plan. The innocent questions of the little
brother who looks out into the frosty night, gathering fear as each
suppliant for the life of Keith of Ewern proffers his vain request
beneath the windows, of the gallery, are answered by the in-
exorable words of the sister, intent upon her false lover's doom ;
while the wailing refrain, “O Mother, Mary Mother,' echoing her
words and thoughts with variations of hopeless pity, is the lament
of an unearthly chorus awake to the catastrophe and powerless
to avert it. Rossetti's use of the refrain is not here, as it is in
Troy Town and Eden Bower, a mere metrical artifice: it is the
crowning feature of the piece, and the highly artificial structure
of the stanza is bent with entire success to the representation
of tragic passion. In Rose Mary, the marvellous element becomes
the subject of direct narrative. The outlines of the picture are
less distinct : the imagination is left to fill in much that defies the
power of words, and the story proceeds with a shadowy movement
like that of the fire-spirits who, gyrating within the beryl-stone,
end the first and second parts of the poem with songs of melan-
choly triumph, circling in a mazy rhythm linked by echoing rimes,
and, cast out of their stronghold, close the third part with a hymn
of anguish. As in Rossetti's later masterpieces of painting and in
his short poem The Card-Dealer, so in Rose Mary, his interest
in the mystical side of his composition leads to some obscurity of
detail and meaning and is the very antithesis of his early pre-
Raphaelite manner.
8-2


## p. 116 (#132) ############################################

116
[CH.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The chief qualities of Rossetti's narrative verse are pictorial and
dramatic. The impressions which it conveys are most powerful
when they act immediately upon the senses.
While his language
is often simple and vigorous, as in The White Ship, its vigour and
simplicity are carefully meditated. His fertility in melodious
phrase, as in The Blessed Damozel and The Staff and Scrip, lulls
the reader in the enchantment of music and colour, and his strains
frequently have a 'dying fall’ which invests some of his lyrics,
such as The Stream's Secret and Love's Nocturn, with a positive
languor of sound. While, however, sensuous and decorative
instincts play a large part in his poetry, and its dramatic effects
depend largely upon circumstances remote from ordinary life, it
cannot be judged on these counts alone. His life was passed
in a world of imagination : its material limits were narrow and
the circle of his friends was restricted. In spite of his up-bringing
as the son of an Italian patriot, he had none of that political
enthusiasm which often kindles the highest poetry. Of con-
temporary poets, Browning had the strongest influence upon
him, exercised chiefly on the side of that spontaneous lyric beauty
which led the young Rossetti to make a manuscript copy of
Pauline for his own use. The monologues, A Last Confession
and Jenny, in which he chose subjects from the life of his own
day, exhibit something of Browning's influence. A Last Con-
,
fession, which embodies a sombre tragedy, was written in blank
verse full of vivid and beautiful description ; but its great merit is
;
the inset lyric, which, written in Italian and translated into English
by Rossetti himself with a skill recalling his earlier translations
from Italian poets, gained enthusiastic praise from so good a
judge of poetry as Swinburne. Jenny, conceived in a reflective
mood and worked out with pre-Raphaelite attention to detail, is
the one poem in which he showed himself alive to the pity and
pathos of everyday life. Its subject gave rise to some unjust
criticism on the part of those who regarded Rossetti as the
master of the 'fleshly' school of poetry. No fair-minded critic,
however fastidious, could take exception to the poet's moral
attitude and his appreciation of the pathetic aspect of his theme;
but the situation of the speaker of the monologue is one with
which moral reflection is seldom associated.
If the greatest function of poetry is its power to interpret the
permanent yet ever new phases of human thought and emotion,
Rossetti was too enchained by material beauty to be in constant
touch with the highest objects of verse. But, in the sonnets of


## p. 117 (#133) ############################################

v]
The House of Life
117
The House of Life, the record of the spiritual experience which
transfigured his whole career from 1850 to his death, the exquisite
craftsmanship that wrought music out of earthly form and colour
was applied to a more abstract use. The sequence is a sequence
only in name, for no connected story, such as ingenious historians
endeavour to weave into Elizabethan sonnet-books, can be made
out of it: each sonnet is, in Rossetti's phrase, a ‘moment's monu-
ment,' numbering high tides of rapture and regret, whose sum is
the impelling force of the poet's inner life. The rhythm and
phraseology are moulded, to a great extent, by Rossetti's early
practice in the translation of Italian sonnets and canzoni, which
imparted an occasional archaism and mannered diction to all his
work; nor could any English sonneteer whose theme was the
passion of love be free from some debt to Shakespeare and the
Elizabethans generally. But Rossetti's familiarity with Italian
models brings The House of Life into competition with his
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century precursors. His imagery and
personifications of abstract qualities are not borrowed at second-
hand, but come direct from the fountain-head of sonnet-poetry,
The sequence has the further virtue that its theme is spontaneous
and personal. The variations upon it are meditated and elaborate,
but they are not embroideries upon an artificial groundwork or
masterly simulations of passion, like those which were a second
nature to poets during the vogue of the sonnet. It was charac-
teristic of Rossetti that concrete manifestations of love should
play a large part in his thought, and his warmth of expression
in certain passages now removed from the collection was the chief
object of the notorious attack by Robert Buchanan, writing under
a pseudonym, to which Swinburne returned a scathing answer.
But the keynote of his love-poetry, which is heard again in the
dactylic measures of The Song of the Bower, is the union of the
body and the soul, in which the impulses of the one are the outward
symbol of the hidden emotions of the other. Throughout the
series, Rossetti's mystical view of life asserts itself more exclusively
than in any of his other poems, and the second part of it is a
dreamland of thought through which the story of his loss is but
vaguely implied. The visions which, for a time, are concentrated
in one bodily shape retain their power after that shape has yielded
to change and fate, and death itself at last is hailed with calmness
as the child of life, surviving love and song and art and bringing
ultimate consolation.
The work of Rossetti as a translator is hardly less remarkable


## p. 118 (#134) ############################################

118
[CH.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
than his original poetry. It is not confined to one language, and
perhaps the most striking example of his power of transmuting
the melody of one tongue into another is his version of Villon's
Ballade des Dames du temps jadis. Italian, however, was as
much his native language as English. His father had won dis-
tinction as a commentator on Dante, and one of his sisters, Maria
Francesca, wrote a popular exposition of Dante which is still
justly valued. His appreciation of the subtleties of English
melody enabled him to present the more ductile cadences of
Italian poetry in an approximately literal English form, full of
softness and grace. It is curious that his English poem Dante
at Verona, though it has a dignity which befits its subject, is
frigid when compared with his other original compositions of
equal importance. Dealing directly with Dante's own work, he
translated his sonnets with the warmest sympathy and turned La
Vita Nuova, the most intimate expression of the emotions of one
of the greatest of poets, into English which gives pleasure for its
own sake. The work of translating the lyrics of Dante's pre-
decessors was achieved with equal skill and gave Rossetti excellent
practice in metrical agility. These poems suffer from monotony
of subject, and the devotion of the gentil cuore to the lady for
whom alone it beats is at once an advantage and a drawback
to Rossetti's translations—an advantage, because most readers
will be content to take them on their own merits, without com-
paring them with the original ; a drawback, because the most
sympathetic student, with full appreciation of their beauty of
phrase and variety of metre, is cloyed with the uniform sweetness
of their prolonged descant upon one theme. The contemporaries
of Dante are more interesting. Guido Cavalcanti had more than
one string to his lyre, and, if it is difficult to take a lively
interest in Cino da Pistoia and the elusive Selvaggia, the graceless
Cecco Angiolieri is more of a human being and his Becchina is not
a mere abstraction.
No more conclusive testimony to the magnetic attraction of
Rossetti's personality could be found than his influence over the
impetuous and restless temperament of William Morris. Morris,
born at Walthamstow on 24 March 1834, had developed his love
of medieval antiquity while at school at Marlborough, and had
gone up to Exeter college, Oxford, in January 1853, a disciple
of tractarianism and with the intention of taking holy orders.
Here he formed his life-long friendship with Edward Burne-Jones,


## p. 119 (#135) ############################################

v]
William Morris
119
a
the two becoming the most prominent members of a circle,
chiefly composed of schoolfellows of Burne-Jones from Birming-
ham and including the poet and historian Richard Watson Dixon.
In 1855, this group took the title 'the Brotherhood. ' Contact
with men of common interests but of some variety of taste
enlarged Morris's sympathies. Under the guidance of Burne-
Jones, he learned to appreciate Chaucer and Malory and was
first introduced to northern mythology and epic. The contrast
between the world of imaginative beauty in which he now
found footing and the conventional hideousness of ordinary
life gave definite shape to his imperfectly understood emotions.
In the summer of 1855, Burne-Jones and Morris, returning from
a tour in northern France and walking by night on the quay at
Havre, decided to abandon their intention of taking orders and
to devote themselves to art. At first, Morris studied architecture
under Street. Under the influence of Rossetti's conviction that
painting was the only art with a future in England, he changed his
profession and pursued painting with characteristic ardour in the
rooms at 17 Red Lion square, which were the birthplace of his
ultimate career as decorative artist and furnisher. During his parti-
cipation in the too hastily considered scheme for frescoing the walls
of the Oxford Union, he met Jane Burden, whom he married
in 1859. After his marriage with this lady, whose type of beauty,
like that of Rossetti's wife, has become a permanent possession
of English art, his substantial income enabled him to choose
and build his home upon Bexley heath. The Red house, designed
by his friend Philip Webb, was the forerunner of a revolution
in domestic architecture, and its furniture and household appli-
ances were designed in a spirit of revolt against the ugliness
which contemporary taste approved. Out of this satisfaction of
personal needs arose, in 1861, the formation of the firm of
decorative artists, guided by the influence of Rossetti and known,
at first, as Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. , which, in process
of time, was entirely controlled by Morris himself and continued
to be the chief practical business of his life. It is not too much
to say that, by thirty-five years of ceaseless activity, from 1861
to his death in 1896, he effected an entire revolution in public
taste. His love of medieval art and literature and his instinct
for all that was beautiful in them were carried into practice in
his workshops, and the contrast between the conditions under
which the masterpieces of medieval art were produced and the
1 See, post, chap. vi.


## p. 120 (#136) ############################################

I 20
[CH.
William Morris
commercialism of the nineteenth century impelled him to his
renunciation of distinctions of class and his fervent advocacy
of the socialist cause as a master-workman. His voluminous
poetry and prose, resorting for its inspiration to an elder day
remote from the life around him, is, superficially, the work of
a dreamer who seeks refuge from materialism in a world of
visions. But, to Morris, his visions were capable of realisa-
tion and formed the inspiration of an eminently practical life.
The Earthly Paradise was written during a period when the
business affairs of his rising firm called for his unwearied
attention.
The active and the contemplative life were, in him,
not mutually opposed but complementary. His periods of retire-
ment to the beautiful manor-house at Kelmscott in the meadows
by the infant Thames, which became his country home from 1871
onwards, recruited the energy of his London life in Hammersmith
mall beside the busier and broader reaches of the same river,
and, as we read his romances in verse and prose, we see in their
imaginings the material which he worked into visible beauty in
his textile fabrics and stained glass.
Morris's earliest attempts at poetry, unpremeditated lyrics in
a highly original style, won the admiration of his friends at Oxford,
who hailed him, rather prematurely, as a great poet. Some of
his poems, with a series of remarkable prose tales, were printed, in
1856, in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, the organ of the
Brotherhood, to which Rossetti also contributed. In this periodical,
the earnestness of purpose which had been fatal to The Germ
was even more marked. Financed largely by Morris, it ran its
course of twelve monthly numbers with a decreasing circulation.
Its contributors were animated by a noble sincerity. Among con-
temporary influences, the poetry of Tennyson and Browning, the
critical philosophy of Ruskin and the chivalrous ideals of The
Newcomes and The Heir of Redclyffe fostered their passion for
truth in life and art. Their performances, however, are, for the
most part, heavy reading, and there can be no doubt that, apart
from Rossetti's imported contributions, the principal literary result
of the Brotherhood's endeavour was Morris's first experiments in
fiction. His rapid and heady style, similar to that of his early
correspondence, is crowded with vividly imagined detail and flashes
out again and again in phrases of picturesque colour. In The
Story of the Unknown Church, he showed his kinship with medieval
life and thought, of which he always wrote with a contemporary
insight and accuracy seldom acquired by scholars and antiquaries.


## p. 121 (#137) ############################################

v]
Early Poems
I 21
The Hollow Land is the first example of his use of an atmosphere
for romance which, though medieval in its general features, can be
referred to no special age or century and became the characteristic
setting of his later prose tales. In the somewhat repellent story
entitled Lindenborg Pool, with a theme and setting which recall
the type of narrative associated with Edgar Allan Poe, he paid
his earliest tribute to the attractions of northern mythology.
Four of the five poems written by Morris for The Oxford and
Cambridge Magazine appeared in 1858, in the volume called The
Defence of Guenevere and other Poems. The contents of this book
are, from one point of view, hasty and unequal. The metre of
Morris's romantic lyrics suffers from overfluency and want of
restraint and is occasionally both weak and harsh. They lack
certainty of touch and completeness of finish ; many of them are
broken off suddenly with an effect of weakness which sinks to
bathos. Full of highly-coloured imagination, they express it in-
articulately and imperfectly in forms which waver between the
lyric and dramatic, in broken phrases and involved sentences.
Their virtue is their spontaneity, a natural, unlaboured gift of
poetry, asserting itself without any definite effort and producing
its treasures without consciousness of the mixture of precious metal
with alloy. They are the experimental work of a poet who has
found no absolutely suitable medium of expression out of many
which appeal to his taste. In the terza rima of The Defence of
Guenevere, the rugged elegiac stanzas of King Arthur's Tomb,
the dramatic blank verse of Sir Peter Harpdon's End, the varied
lyric measures of Rapunzel, the ballad metre of Welland River
and the recurrent refrains of Two Red Roses across the Moon,
The Song of the Gillyflower and The Sailing of the Sword, a spirit
intoxicated with the romance of the past is striving after a perfect
utterance of its sense of beauty. Morris's admiration of Browning
is, probably, responsible for the frequent intricacy of his style: this
influence had entire control of Sir Peter Harpdon's End, where
Browning's alternations of roughness and abruptness with smoothly
flowing passages are closely imitated. Yet, although in these early
pieces Morris was swayed by varying influences, there is none in
which his sensitiveness to the charm of colour and sound and scenery,
to all the beauty of the visible world, fails to find expression. He
is frequently spoken of as though he were a member of the pre-
Raphaelite school. His connection with it was indirect, and his
art had little in common with the accurate genre-painting which
it had been the immediate object of that school to promote. But


## p. 122 (#138) ############################################

I 22
[CH.
William Morris
a
his truth of detail was pre-Raphaelite in the wider sense of the
word and his realism was more thorough than the realism which
became more and more a mere incident in Rossetti's verse and
departed from his painting. Morris was more closely attached
than Rossetti to the world around him; the most vivid landscapes
of his poems belong to the English country to whose quiet moods
he was perpetually alive. His love of romance has been attributed
to his Celtic ancestry; but the sights and sounds amid which his
gifts were developed were characteristically English, and, even in
the lands of fantasy in which his later prose tales were laid, his
best power of description was exercised upon the meadows and
villages, the winding streams and chalk downs, the marshes and
seaward flats of the parts of England that he knew best. More
than Rossetti, too, he was awake to the sense of struggle in life,
which is the animating power of the highest form of narrative.
If it is wrong to count Rossetti merely as a languid aesthete,
catching at the pleasurable moments of life and allowing its serious-
ness to escape unmarked, a similar estimate, which might easily be
formed by a casual survey of Morris's preference for a bygone age,
taken together with the archaisms of his style and his characteri-
sation of himself as 'the idle singer of an empty day,'would be even
more superficial. The echoes of the pain and suffering of the outside
world are never silent in his enchanted world of fable; they are the
disturbing force of that tender and resigned melancholy in which
his personages, acutely conscious of the shortness of life and the
transitoriness of beauty, move to their appointed end.
This sense of the intimate connection between poetry and life,
in which one becomes the best interpreter of the other, grew with
advancing years. The practical and visionary elements in Morris's
character drew more closely together, and, as the union progressed,
his poetry grew in strength and purpose. Nine years after The
Defence of Guenevere, he appeared, in The Life and Death of
Jason, as a master of romantic narrative. His treatment of his
classical subject was founded upon medieval practice. His master
in narrative poetry was Chaucer : he employed the couplet,
Chaucer's most perfect medium for story-telling, and, as in The
Knightes Tale, he translated a tale whose nominal scene was the
antique world into the terms of the age of chivalry. Nevertheless,
while the form which he adopted was Chaucerian, the spirit of his
story was different. Just as the couplet-form which he used,
although derived from Chaucer, had passed since Chaucer's day
under the influence of Dryden and Keats and had been moulded


## p. 123 (#139) ############################################

v] The Earthly Paradise
123
by them into the shape in which Morris received it, so no modern
writer, however closely in sympathy with a past age, could wholly
reproduce an attitude towards love and chivalry which the con-
ditions of modern life have changed profoundly. The love of
Palamon and Arcite for Emelye, devouring in its passion and
tragic in its consequences, was the unavoidable duty of a medieval
knight, a necessary part of the science of his profession. Morris's
Jason and Medea submit to the dominion of a natural instinct
apart from any code of manners, their delight in the present being
tempered by foreboding of the future. Medea is not the queen
of a court of love, who takes Jason's devotion as a conventional
homage : she is a modern woman, surrendering all to her love and
putting her fortunes in her lover's hands, with her eyes fully open
to the risks which she willingly runs. In this respect, Morris comes
nearer to classical antiquity than to his medieval model. His
love-story is free from those constant touches of humour which
link Chaucer to the modern world : on the other hand, his sense
of the pathos of life is deeper than Chaucer's. The tale of Jason
and Medea is informed by the spirit which fills Vergil's tale of
Dido and Aeneas.
With their love they fill the earth alone,
Careless of shame, and not remembering death.
While that love is a temporary forgetfulness of the 'fury and
distress' of life, its future is darkened by the haunting sense of
satiety and decay, the Vergilian consciousness of lacrymae rerum,
'sorrow that bides and joy that fleets away. '
The same contrast between the setting of the poem and its
inner spirit is obvious in The Earthly Paradise, a series of
twenty-four tales in verse, two for each month of the year, pub-
lished in three volumes between 1868 and 1870. They are bound
together, in imitation of Chaucer, by a connecting link which
forms the subject of the prologue. A company of wanderers,
driven from their Scandinavian home by the great pestilence
which overspread Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century,
after long journeyings in search of the fabled earthly paradise,
come, ‘shrivelled, bent, and grey,' to'a nameless city in a distant
sea,' where Hellenic civilisation and culture have been preserved.
Here, they find rest and hospitality, and twice a month they and
their hosts meet at a solemn feast, at which a story is related.
An ingenious medley of romance is thus provided. Twelve of the
stories, told by elders of the city, come from classical sources ;
the other twelve, told by the wanderers, are derived chiefly from


## p. 124 (#140) ############################################

124
[CH.
William Morris
medieval Latin, French and Icelandic originals, with gleanings from
Mandeville and The Arabian Nights. The metrical forms employed
throughout are Chaucerian, with those inevitable modifications
which the progress of literary form had brought to pass. The
prologue, the narrative links between tale and tale and eight of
the stories themselves are written in the ten-syllabled couplet.
Seven stories, six of which are told by the wanderers, are in the
short couplet of The Book of the Duchesse and The Hous of
Fame. The rest, with the short lyrics in which each month is
introduced, are in the seven-lined stanza of Troilus and Criseyde.
That all the stories should be equal in interest is not to be
expected, and a few are written in a somewhat perfunctory spirit.
Where, however, a tale, familiar and often told though it might be,
really arrested Morris, he used all his power to adorn it with novel
detail, and the success of The Life and Death of Jason is well
maintained in The Doom of King Acrisius and The Story of
Cupid and Psyche. The wanderers' narratives, to the tellers of
which the noble prologue gives a more dramatic interest than to
the placid elders of the undisturbed city, are naturally less familiar
and have less to fear from competition than the classical stories.
In one of these, The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon,
Morris taxed his narrative power to its utmost capacity by giving
his romance the shape of a dream told within a dream at broken
intervals. In all the stories alike, his command over his metre and
rhythm is unfailing. He achieves no striking effects such as were
promised by the irregular and faulty measures of The Defence of
Guenevere. In The Life and Death of Jason he had settled down
to a smooth and steady pace of reserved energy. To a sensitive
ear his prosody lacks variety: in his disregard of the elision of
vowels and his fondness for riming weak syllables there is a want
of robustness, which, however, is thoroughly in keeping with the
character of the old and worn narrators and their autumnal view
of life. The interest which his stories excite, however, precludes
monotony, while their consistent tunefulness, if it provides few
individual passages which can be remembered for their own sake
and involves a considerable amount of repetition of the same
minor air, creates a harmonious atmosphere entirely appropriate
to the waking dream in which they are set. From the purely
poetic point of view, the most memorable passages of the poem
are the interpolated lyrics in which, at the beginning of each
month, Morris records his own delight in the changing English
landscape, the verses in which he bids adieu to his accomplished


## p. 125 (#141) ############################################

v]
Translations
125
task, and the occasional snatches of song introduced into the
stories. To these last, as to the Christmas carol of The Land
East of the Sun and West of the Moon, he gave a freshness and
charm already heralded by the shorter lyrics in The Defence of
Guenevere and 'I know a little garden close' in The Life and
Death of Jason.
In the later portion of The Earthly Paradise, the pure
romance of his earlier stories began to give place to a higher
and stronger form of poetry. The transition to epic, with its
prevailing theme of strife and suffering, is marked by Bellerophon
at Argos and Bellerophon in Lycia, and still more strikingly, in
view of later developments, by The Lovers of Gudrun. His feeling
for the classical epic led to his translations of The Aeneids of
Virgil, in 1875, and the Odyssey in 1887, the first of which, at any
rate, showed an appreciation of the spirit and influence of the
poem superior to its actual rendering of Vergil's individuality of
style. His imagination, however, found its true home in the less
trodden fields of the northern saga. The Lovers of Gudrun, a
version of the Icelandic Laxdaela saga in heroic couplet, is the
masterpiece of The Earthly Paradise. The habitual melancholy,
with its emphasis upon the shortness of life and the bitterness of
love, is apparent here, but without the romantic listlessness which
besets it elsewhere. Kiartan, Bodli, Ospak, Gudrun are active
living figures engaged in dramatic conflict befitting the stern and
barren scene of northern legend. In 1869 and 1870, Morris had
collaborated with Eiríkr Magnússon, in the translation of Grettis
saga and Volsunga saga, and, in 1871, he reached an epoch
in his life with his first visit to Iceland and the actual scenes of
the events of the stories of Grettir, Gudrun and Burnt Njal, where
“every place and name marks the death of' the 'short-lived eager-
ness and glory of this home of epic poetry. His literary work
during the next few years included the morality Love is Enough,
the structure of which, a play presented within a play, resembles
the intricate method employed in The Land East of the Sun
and West of the Moon. For this, he adopted a somewhat
monotonous form of unrimed verse, more definitely archaic in
form and spirit than any of his other work; but its unattractive-
ness is redeemed by occasional passages of description in which
his love and knowledge of medieval art overcome all obstacles,
while the long rimed measures of 'the Music,' the series of inter-
ludes by which the drama of Pharamond and Azalais is broken
into parts and the amoebaean lyric of the emperor and empress


## p. 126 (#142) ############################################

126
[ch.
William Morris
with its answering refrains are, perhaps, his highest lyric achieve-
ments. Love is Enough was, however, merely a divergence from
the channel which his verse had now marked out for itself.
In 1875, he published his translation of the Aeneid and a small
volume of translations of Icelandic stories which preluded his
most ambitious poem, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the
Fall of the Niblungs.
This epic in four books, founded upon the prose Volsunga saga,
was published in 1876. Its story, in loftiness of theme and the
completeness with which it is controlled by an overmastering fate,
is at least the equal of the great Greek legends ; and, to tell it,
Morris employed an anapaestic couplet of his own invention, with
six beats to each line. This metre, which he afterwards used in
his translation of the Odyssey, suited the natural ease and rapidity
of his writing. The swinging cadences might easily become mono-
tonous or slovenly; but the nobility of his story had so thoroughly
taken hold of him that he never sacrificed dignity to swiftness
of execution. With plentiful variety of movement, a stateliness
appropriate to the theme is maintained throughout the whole of
the poem. It has been questioned whether Volsunga saga, as
a whole, is suitable for epic treatment. Morris himself closed his
story with the death of Gudrun, the true consummation of all the
death of kings and kindreds, and the sorrow of Odin the Goth,'
without proceeding to the final incidents of the saga, but he intro-
duced, in his first book, the whole grim episode of Sigmund and
Signy and the monstrous Sinfiotli, which is purely preliminary to,
and, in fact, a separate story from, the epic of Sigurd, son of
Sigmund and Hiordis. That the book thus falls into two epics,
a short and a long one, cannot be gainsaid, and there is a signal
contrast between the inhumanity of the opening story, whose
personages excite terror and repulsion but little sympathy, and
the gentler aspect of its sequel, in which, superhuman though the
actors are in stature and in spirit, their errors and woes are those
of mortality. Morris, however, so managed the transition from the
overture to the actual drama that the interest is not suspended or
noticeably broken, and, before our concentration upon the fate of
Sigmund is wholly diverted, we are carried away upon the tide of
Sigurd’s heroic youth. The episodes follow one another with unfail-
ing vigour and freshness, and, in the climax of the story, the slaying
of the Niblung kings, the slayers of Sigurd, in the hall of Atli, the
death-song of Gunnar among the serpents and the vengeance and
death of Gudrun, Morris pursued his theme triumphantly to the


## p. 127 (#143) ############################################

v]
Prose Narratives
127
end. If the chosen form of Sigurd the Volsung did not wholly
fulfil its promise when it came to cope with the Homeric hexa-
meter, it was at least thoroughly adequate to an occasion when
Morris was free to deal with his story untrammelled by the
exigencies of translation.
After Sigurd, Morris practically abandoned poetry, save for the
Odyssey, and his last original book of verse was the collection of
lyrics and ballads, Poems by the Way, issued from the Kelmscott
press in 1891. His activities outside his artistic life during the
early eighties were devoted to the spread of socialism and to
enthusiasms closely connected with his love of beauty and his
attempt to realise the past in the present. His socialist propa-
ganda was marked by two romances, A Dream of John Ball,
remarkable for its vivid and beautiful medieval setting amid
English village scenery, and the Utopian News from Nowhere,
whose doctrinal aspect has earned it a fame out of proportion to
its actual merits. In 1889, when his political energy, though
not abated, had been somewhat disappointed by the intracta-
bility of those with whom he had associated himself, he returned
to pure romance with the prose story, interspersed with lyrics,
The House of the Wolfings. This was followed, in 1890, by
The Roots of the Mountains and, in 1891, by The Story of
the Glittering Plain. Morris succeeded in communicating his
own pleasure in these narratives to the reader; and the in-
definiteness of place and time in which they are set, contrasted
with the extreme definiteness of their imaginary topography,
gives them the vivid charm of fairy-tale. His mind still
ran upon the northern epic, and the scenes and personages of the
first three of these romances, so far as they belong to any
country at all, belong to the remote north of Europe. In The
Roots of the Mountains, the longest of the three, the self-con-
tained life of a pastoral community threatened by the mysterious
barbarians of the neighbouring forest tracts, and its victory over
them with the aid of a warrior race from a distant valley, are
pictured with extraordinary completeness and sustained interest.
In 1892, Morris produced a translation of Beowulf in collaboration
with A. J. Wyatt, and, in 1891, he began, with Eiríkr Magnússon,
to produce a Saga library which included a version of the
Heimskringla. Amid the crowded interests of the closing years
of his life the production of magnificently printed volumes from
the Kelmscott press took the chief place, while his love of
medieval architecture prompted him to protest with increasing


## p. 128 (#144) ############################################

1-28
[CH.
William Morris
vehemence on behalf of the Society for the Protection of Ancient
Buildings, which he had founded in 1877, against destructive
works of so-called restoration. Meanwhile, his leisure hours were
occupied with prose romance of which the atmosphere was chiefly
medieval. The brief The Wood beyond the World (1895) was
followed, in 1896, by The Well at the World's End, a somewhat
prolix tale, the interest of which, however, is continually revived
by scenes and episodes of memorable clearness and beauty. Two
more romances
romances were published posthumously, The Water of
the Wondrous Isles, the most fairylike of the series, and The
Sundering Flood, which he finished less than a month before his
death. In these later books, the attraction which he felt for the
England of Chaucer's day is as powerful as it was in The Earthly
Paradise ; if their passages of adventure amid black mountains
and 'perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn' belong to a world
common to all lovers of the marvellous and romantic, the lowland
country in which his heroes have their home, with its meadow-
lands, its cities of merchants and its abbeys and priories, is the
English country to which his imagination restored its fourteenth-
century aspect, peopling it with feudal lords and their households,
prosperous middle-class traders and the labourers who listened
to the preaching of John Ball. Malory, equally beloved with
Chaucer, had his influence on Morris's prose style, but the peculiar
archaisms in which it abounds were natural to Morris's thought
and were used with a vigour free from affectation. On 3 October
1896, the greatest master of romantic story-telling among modern
Englishmen died at his London residence, Kelmscott house, Ham-
mersmith, worn out by a life of unceasing work, in which he had
endeavoured, with remarkable consistence and success, to realise
and translate into practice for his countrymen the beauty of the
visionary world of his prose and poetry. His love of the beautiful
work of the past, material and imaginative, stood for him in the
place of religious fervour, and his whole strength of purpose was
dedicated to the reconstitution of modern life upon conditions
similar to those under which such work, impossible in an age of
mere competition for money, was produced. Read in this light, his
writings are no mere pictures of an irrecoverable past painted
with a dilettante regretfulness: they are a coherent revelation of
his sources of inspiration in his combat with the torpor from
which, like Ruskin and Carlyle, he, not the least of the three,
strove to deliver the life of his day.


## p. 129 (#145) ############################################

v]
Algernon Charles Swinburne
129
The dedication of The Defence of Guenevere to Rossetti testified
to the quickening power exercised over Morris by his association
with that less prolific and more fastidious genius. To Rossetti, also,
was dedicated, in 1860, the first work of Algernon Charles Swinburne,
The Queen Mother and Rosamond, two poetical dramas written
in elaborate and intricate blank verse and containing incidental
lyrics in English and French. For the time being, the book
passed almost unnoticed. Swinburne, born in 1837, belonged to
a younger branch of the Northumbrian family of that name.
His youth, spent between the isle of Wight and the house of his
grandfather, Sir John Swinburne, at Capheaton in the country
between Morpeth and Bellingham, fired him with a passionate
enthusiasm for the sea and open country, which supplied his verse
with an inexhaustible theme. At Eton and Balliol college, Oxford,
he developed his inborn love of poetry, and, although he came into
close connection and friendship with Rossetti and his circle and
shared their love for medieval romance, it was with a taste already
formed for other types of verse that exercised little, if any, direct
influence upon them. To more than an ordinary Englishman's
pride in his country and her past achievements, his reading of the
Athenian drama revealed the meaning and value of the liberty
for which Athens and the England of Shakespeare had alike con-
tended. His sympathy with republican freedom was learned from
Landor and Shelley and, last but not least, from Victor Hugo, who
shared with Shakespeare the shrine of his life-long idolatry. To
Victor Hugo's mastery over the forms of lyric and dramatic verse
he owed his most direct impulse: it is not too much to say that,
after a certain period, under the conviction that no man could
do more than Hugo had done, Swinburne's poetry became domi-
nated by the ambition of following in his footsteps and ringing
changes on the themes already chosen by Hugo's manifold genius.
Of other French poets, Gautier and Baudelaire affected him with
their command of form and melody, and it was on this side of
his appreciations, open to sensuous impression, that Rossetti's
peculiar vividness of phrase and harmony of music appealed
to him. Daringly irreverent in his rejection of all conventions
that seemed to repress the freedom of the human spirit, he paid
humble and, at times, uncritical homage to works of human genius,
even when they were least in sympathy with his fervently held
and freely uttered creed of liberty. In the childlike frankness
of his denunciation of kings and priests he rivalled the outspoken-
ness of Shelley, whose lyric copiousness and variety he even
E. L. XIII.
CH, V.
9


## p. 130 (#146) ############################################

130
[CH.
Swinburne
surpassed. But, while Shelley, of the masters of English song,
came nearest to him in point of time and the spirit of his verse,
the cadences of his music were also founded upon the Eliza-
bethans and Milton, and no influences moulded his phraseology
so completely as the sacred literature, biblical and liturgical, of the
religion whose professors were the objects of his tireless invective.
Atalanta in Calydon and Chastelard in 1865 and Poems and
Ballads in 1866 won Swinburne celebrity and notoriety. Chaste-
lard, the first of his three plays upon the life of Mary queen of
Scots, is a romantic drama in the style of his two earlier works.
Atalanta, classical in subject, was an attempt to reproduce the
characteristic forms of Greek drama in a corresponding English
dress. The dialogue, closely following the conventional order of
Greek tragedy, is in the involved blank verse, copious and
pregnant in its content and artfully varied in its music, for
which he had already shown his capacity. In his choruses, he
adopted rimed stanzaic forms, in which he gave proof of an un-
paralleled range of musical compass.
While his subsequent
poetry showed that his metrical agility was incapable of ex-
haustion, he never excelled the ringing melody of the famous
hymn to Artemis, afire with the new-born passion of spring, the
firm and rapid tread with which 'Before the beginning of years
proceeds to the melancholy assurance of its climax and the wave-
like measures of the coupós, weighted with the certainty of tragic
doom, near the end of the poem. Atalanta is no mere archaic
experiment: its structure is superficially Greek, and the old
classical themes of controlling fate and divine intervention
pervade its story; but the spirit in which it is written is the
modern spirit of revolt against the religious acquiescence in the
will of Heaven accepted by Greek tragedy. The cause which it
pleads is that of 'the holy spirit of man’ against the tyranny of
the gods who divide and devour. ' Its sympathy is with the
beauty and strength of life and nature, and its burden is a
complaint against the supreme evil' whose weapons are decay
and death. It needs no reading between the lines to see that
Swinburne's eloquence, in rhythms and periods which taxed all
the resources of modern romantic poetry, arraigned the sub-
servience of man, not only to the gods of ancient Greece, but
to the religious ideals of his own day. Following Shelley's
audacious reversal of the principles of good and evil, typified
in The Revolt of Islam by the conflict between the eagle of
tyranny and the serpent of freedom, he denounced the binding
6


## p. 131 (#147) ############################################

v]
Poems and Ballads
131
spell of creeds with a free appropriation of the august language
of the charms with which that spell had been woven round the
heart of the nations.
The atheism of Atalanta might pass unchallenged, so long as it
was partly veiled by its antique setting; but Poems and Ballads not
unnaturally shocked austere critics by its negation of conventional
reticence. Not all the beauty of its verse can palliate Swinburne's
waywardness in his choice of themes, and his attempt to accli-
matise his fleurs du mal to English soil in defiance of prudery
and philistinism created a prejudice against him in a society
which had responded heartily to Tennyson's noble celebration of
duty and virtue and welcomed the bracing quality of Browning's
optimism. The subjects of Laus Veneris, Anactoria, Faustine
and The Leper were sensual obsessions, marring and wasting life :
their end, satiety and hopeless weariness of spirit, was the burden
of Dolores, licet and The Triumph of Time. No one could
have felt more amusement than Swinburne himself at the plea
occasionally made by his defenders that Dolores is a moral
sermon, because it is full of the pain and bitterness of sensual
indulgence. The spirit of Poems and Ballads is frankly pagan :
the goddess, hominum divumque voluptas, to whose cult it is
dedicated, is, also, our Lady of Pain : the inevitable escape from
the barren pleasures of her worship and the revulsions of feeling
which they entail is the end of all, the poppied sleep. ' There are,
naturally, two opinions upon the desirability of asserting such
views publicly without suggesting a tonic remedy; but there can
be no question as to the beauty of form in which the assertion
was clothed.
Swinburne's work, as a whole, suffers from the
paucity of its contents ; his rapid genius was too easily satisfied
with returning to the same themes over and over again and re-
affirming them with increased emphasis but little variety. But, in
metrical skill and in the volume of his highly decorated language,
he had no rival among English poets. The first of these qualities
he preserved to the end ; the second was somewhat affected, as
time went on, by the monotony, already noticed, of his favourite
subjects, which became unequal to the strain put upon them by
their constant changes of elaborate dress. In Poems and Ballads,
however, as in Atalanta, his verse had lost none of its freshness,
and his metre and rhythm adapted themselves freely to change of
subject. The 'profuse strains of unpremeditated art' of the earlier
romantic poets were not his ; but the constraint of form was a
positive pleasure to him, under which he moved with unequalled
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132
[CH.
Swinburne
freedom. The slow movement of Laus Veneris, and the sorrow-
laden spondees of Ilicet, the impetuous haste with which the lover in
The Triumph of Time flings away regretfully but unhesitatingly his
past happiness with both hands, the forced lightness of Faustine,
the swift anapaests of Dolores, full of reckless glorying in forbidden
pleasure, the solemn affirmations and cowed responses of A Litany,
the bird-notes of Itylus, mingling with magic skill the sweet-
ness and sorrow of the nightingale's song, the careless innocence
of A Match, are striking instances of his power of adapting
sound to meaning. Characteristic features of all these poems
are the use of alliteration and of words which, by community of
sound and form, echo and are complementary to one another.
The accusation of sound without sense has been brought by
unsympathetic critics against poetry in which the charm of
sound is remarkable. If Swinburne's wealth of language some-
times obscured his meaning with allusiveness and periphrases,
his rhythm is an unfailing guide to the spirit of his words.
Poems and Ballads contained tributes of admiration to
Landor and Victor Hugo, while A Christmas Carol and The
Masque of Queen Bersabe, to say nothing of the constant use
of imagery and phrase in Laus Veneris and other poems, were
evidence of close kinship with the medieval romance beloved of
Rossetti and his circle. There were signs, also, in this volume
of the special enthusiasm which filled Swinburne’s next books of
verse. The spirit of liberty was abroad upon the winds. In 1867,
,
the poet whose hymns of lust and satiety had dazzled the lovers
of poetry with their youthful vigour sang the praise of Mazzini
and Garibaldi in A Song of Italy. Songs before Sunrise in
1871 was a collection of poems written during the final struggle
for Italian freedom. To analyse its characteristics would be to
repeat what has been said already of Poems and Ballads. It
includes much of Swinburne's best work, the majestic Hertha, the
lament for captive Italy in Super Flumina Babylonis and the
apostrophe to France in Quia Multum Amavit, whose strains
sway and fluctuate at will between fierce scorn for the oppressor
and tenderness for his victims, hope and comfort for Italy in her
slavery, compassion for prostituted France. Where Victor Hugo's
war music had led the way, Swinburne's clarion was bound to
follow. It was difficult to enter a field so fully occupied by the
author of Les Châtiments, and it must be owned that, when the
clarion sounded a charge against Napoleon III, it made up for
want of originality by an excess of shrillness. Nevertheless, the


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v]
Bothwell and Erechtheus
133
sonnets written at intervals during this period and collected
under the title Dirae sound an individual note of abuse and add
their quota to the imagery even of such poems as L'Égout de Rome.
After the achievement of Italian hope in 1870 and the fall
of Napoleon III, which he hailed with savage delight in 1871,
Swinburne had leisure to return to more purely artistic work.
In the length and rhetoric of Bothwell, sequel to Chastelard
and precursor of Mary Stuart, he followed the example of
Hugo's Cromwell. This play, published in 1874, is a dramatic
poem in which he pursued with close attention to historical fact
his conception of Mary's character, defending her against the
sympathisers who, in their anxiety to clear her of knavery, only
succeeded in convicting her of senseless folly. Unfitted by its
extreme length for the stage, Bothwell is yet a work of great
dramatic power ; its sustained speeches, chief among them the
great speech of Knox, are written in music which is susceptible to
every change of tone, and tragic terror could go no further than
in the scene at Kirk of Field where, before Darnley's murder,
Mary is heard singing snatches of Lord Love went maying, the
lyric sung by Rizzio to the queen and her ladies on the night of
his death. As Bothwell followed Chastelard, so Erechtheus, in
1876, followed Atalanta with equal eloquence and with a some-
what closer relation to the inner spirit of Greek tragic form than
its predecessor. The lyric choruses of Erechtheus, while they give
less immediate delight than the enchanting music of those in
Atalanta, have a more constant loftiness and majesty, and no
passage of Swinburne's lyric work is more spontaneous and splendid
than the apostrophe to Athens, the
fruitful immortal anointed adored
Dear city of men without master or lord,
which is an episode of the opening chorus. Athens is the true
heroine of the drama ; love of country and hatred of slavery are
its inspiring passions.
A second series of Poems and Ballads showed no falling off in
melody, with a more chastened tone than that of the first volume.
There is equal ease in Swinburne's handling of the music of
enchantment in A Forsaken Garden and of the dignified choral
harmonies of Ave atque Vale, his beautiful tribute to the memory
of Baudelaire. In his translations of some of Villon's ballades, he
acknowledged, with his usual generosity, his inferiority to Rossetti
in this field : if, in choice of material, he was too often guided by
the example of others in whose wake it was dangerous to follow,
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134
Swinburne
[ch.
it was, at any rate, with an admiration totally distinct from
a desire to rival them. Studies in Song and Songs of the
Springtides, in 1880, were full of love of the sea, the prevailing
passion of his later verse. By the North Sea, a lyric symphony
in seven movements echoing the rushing of the east wind and
the chiming of sun-lit breakers beating upon a crumbling coast,
was his highest tribute to the resistless power and eternity of
ocean, the sense of which plays an animate part in the later
Tristram of Lyonesse and Marino Faliero. A rather excessive
ingenuity obscures the Song for the Centenary of Walter Savage
Landor and the Birthday Ode to Victor Hugo: allusions to the
works of these authors are woven into the substance of both
poems with a skill that suggests an acrostic, and the short explana-
tory key which Swinburne found it necessary to add to them is an
indication of his own uneasiness on this head. His own humour
was quick to detect possible weaknesses in the fiery enthusiasm
of his verse, and in the same year he parodied himself mercilessly
and perfectly in the last piece of the anonymous Heptalogia.
Most lovers of Swinburne will agree that the Tristram of
Lyonesse volume, published in 1882, is the crown of his mature
work. The long romance in couplets which is the title-piece
challenges comparison with the romantic narratives of William
Morris.