No More Learning

And the first two essays, in particular,
1 It is a pity that no complete edition of Arnold's prose works has yet been
published. In a selection of his essays issued by the Oxford university press in
1914, “five essays hitherto uncollected' were included, the most interesting of which
are, perhaps, a review, reprinted from Macmillan's Magazine for February 1863, of
Stanley's Lectures on the Jewish Church and a short article entitled Obermann, written
in 1869.
? Preface to second edition of Poems, 1854.


## p. 99 (#115) #############################################

6
>
IV]
Essays in Criticism
99
struck a note of challenge to all the popular critics of the day.
They proclaimed the appearance of a paladin bent, above everything,
upon piercing the armour of self-sufficiency and ‘provinciality,' in
which the average English "authority in matters of taste' had been
accustomed to strut with much confidence. Here, for the first time,
we come across verbal weapons to be repeatedly used with devas-
tating effect in a lifelong campaign against the hosts of Philistia.
The famous nickname ‘Philistine,' borrowed from Heine, makes its
first appearance in this book-to denote the strong, dogged, un-
enlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of light. '
We now first hear, also, of the provincial spirit,' the best that is
known and thought in the world, the free play of the mind,'
'flexibility of intelligence'-afterwards to be identified with Plato's
EvTpaTrelía – prose of the centre,' the modern spirit,''criticism
?
of life’ and other phrases destined, by reiterated use, to become
familiar. Although the author's weapons were mainly of his own
making, his way of using them, his adroit and dexterous methods
of attack, had been learnt from France. French prose, for
Matthew Arnold, was the 'prose of the centre,' the nearest modern
equivalent to 'Attic prose,' and the two contemporary critics he
admired most were Sainte-Beuve and Renan. In purely literary
criticism, Sainte-Beuve is his chief model; but his methods in
other critical fields were largely the results of his reading of
Renan. As early as 1859, he speaks of Renan as one 'between
whose line of endeavour and my own I imagine there is con-
siderable resemblance? The two resembled each other not least
in the adoption of a style, lenis, minimeque pertinax—ʻsinuous,
easy, unpolemical’-very unlike the 'highly-charged, heavy-shotted
articles' of English newspaper critics'.
Arnold's knowledge and appreciation of French prose were
wide and peculiarly sensitive, and stand in curious contrast to his
lack of enthusiasm for, if not indifference to, French poetry.
France, 'famed in all great arts, in none supreme,' appeared to him
to have achieved her most signal triumphs in prose, but his
partiality to French prose led him to some strange vagaries of
judgment in his estimates of individual writers. Sainte-Beuve and
Renan, no doubt, deserved the flattery he paid both by imitating
them, but he has given an exaggerated importance to such writers
as the Du Guérins, Joubert and Amiel.
1 In “A speech at Eton,' Mixed Essays.
? Letters, vol. 1, p. 111.
3 See his essay . Numbers' in Discourses in America.
909684A
7-2


## p. 100 (#116) ############################################

Іоо
[CH.
Matthew Arnold
a
When we turn from these eccentric preferences to the main
principles of his literary criticism, we find, in his definitions of them,
at any rate, much that is incontrovertible and a little that is open to
question. 'Disinterestedness,' detachment, he tells us, is the first
requisite in a literary critic-'a disinterested endeavour to learn
and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world. '
With this goes ‘knowledge'; and no English critic is adequately
equipped who does not possess one great literature, at least,
besides his own. Criticism in England was altogether too pro-
vincial. Nothing quite like this had been stated in English before,
and no critic, in his practice, made so sedulous an effort as Arnold
to convince his countrymen of their insularity, and to persuade
them to acquire an European outlook in literature and art. When
he becomes a little more particular in his definitions and says
that 'the end and aim of all literature' is 'a criticism of life,
and, again, that 'poetry is, at bottom, a criticism of life, he
provokes a debate which, at one time, was pursued with con-
siderable spirit and some acerbity-especially, as Sir Leslie
Stephen has put it, by critics who were unable to distinguish
between an epigram and a philosophical dogma. '
While little fault can be found with his standards and ideals,
as a critic of poetry, some of his methods lie open to easy and
serious objection. Their defects are inherent in the very qualities
that give charm and individuality to the best of his literary
criticisms. None of his works exhibits so well both the strength and
the weakness of his methods as The Study of Celtic Literature-
one of the most delightful of his books, consisting of a number of
Oxford lectures directly inspired by an essay by Renan? . In his
excursions into the Celtic wonderland, Arnold lacked one of the
chief qualifications which he desiderates in a critic——knowledge.
At least, he had no knowledge of a single Celtic tongue; and,
though he wanders into by-paths of ethnology and philology, be
has to rely upon the learning of others for evidence in support of
his brilliant generalisations. But, even those who do know some-
thing of the Celtic tongues are among the first to recognise these
lectures as a triumph of the intuitional method in their instinctive
seizure of the things that really matter in Celtic literature, and in
their picturesque diagnosis of the Celtic genius. The intuitional'
process, however, has its dangers, and the passages in which
1
6
Essays in Criticism, vol. I, • Joubert. '
See, especially, Introduction to T. H. Ward's English Poets.
3 The Poetry of the Celtic Races. '
6


## p. 101 (#117) ############################################

1v]
Culture and Anarchy
IOI
>
>
1
1
Arnold traces the Celtic 'note' in Shakespeare, Byron, Keats,
Macpherson and the rest are about as adventurous an example of
skating on the thin ice of criticism as anything to be found in
our literature.
The first two of Essays in Criticism, semi-polemical as they
were in their motive, and creating, as they did, a considerable stir
among the Philistines, seem to have opened Arnold's eyes to his
opportunities as a social critic. He became conscious, by degrees,
of having something like a 'mission' to his countrymen, who soon
came to speak of him as, pre-eminently, the 'apostle of culture'
in the England of his day. It was the effect of Essays in
Criticism that led to the composition by instalments, between
1867 and 1869, of the book ultimately called Culture and Anarchy,
which may be termed his central work in criticism other than
literary, containing, as it does, the quintessence of what he had
already written, and of much that he was again to write, upon
English life and character. Memorable phrases which he had
already used are here effectively repeated and expanded; and
new phrases and catch-words, with the same quality of 'adhe-
siveness' as the old, are paraded with the same imperturbable
iteration. Some of these phrases, such as 'sweetness and light
and 'the Dissidence of Dissent,' are borrowed from wellknown
sources, while other things, like the description of English public
life as a 'Thyestean banquet of claptrap,' and the definition of
'the two points of influence' between which our world moves as
'Hebraism and Hellenism,' are the author's own. Culture and
Anarchy is, if not a great, an undoubtedly stimulating, book,
still capable of exerting a strong influence on young minds. In
1871, Arnold published another series of essays in social criticism
under the title Friendship’s Garland, perhaps the most mis-
chievously amusing of his books.
It was, undoubtedly, the impression made in certain quarters
by Culture and Anarchy that led Arnold into the somewhat
perilous field of theological and religious criticism-in which
his chief works are St Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature
and Dogma (1873), God and the Bible (1875) and Last Essays
on Church and Religion (1877). Little need be said of these
works here, constituting as they do, as a whole, the least valuable
and enduring group of his prose writings. The most popular of
them in its day was Literature and Dogma, a work bearing obvious
marks of the influence of Renan, and an elaborate disquisition
upon a text enunciated in Culture and Anarchy—No man, who


## p. 102 (#118) ############################################

IO2
[CH.
Matthew Arnold
a
knows nothing else, knows even his own Bible. ' The frequent
flippancy, not to say levity, of tone which characterises his treat-
ment of sacred subjects in this and other books, together with his
too exclusively literary and 'intuitional critical methods in dealing
with problems of theological scholarship, aroused a good deal of
resentment. No careful and dispassionate reader of his religious
writings can, however, have any question about the sincerity and
the seriousness of Arnold's motives. Some of his catch-phrases
obtained a wide currency, and are, perhaps, destined to live among
the most famous things of their kind coined by him. The defini-
tion of God as 'a stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes
for righteousness,' of religion as ‘morality touched by emotion,'
of emriel kela as the sweet reasonableness' of Jesus-these and
other phrases have an epigrammatic quality which will prevent
their being soon forgotten.
Sufficient has been incidentally said about the characteristics
of Matthew Arnold's prose style to make it unnecessary to
attempt here any elaborate estimate of its qualities as a whole.
"The needful qualities of a fit prose,' he himself has said, in a
familiar sentence, ‘are regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. '
All these things, it may be said, Arnold's own prose has as
markedly as that of any other modern English writer. The one
pre-eminent virtue of his prose, as of his verse, style is its lucidity
—we never miss, or doubt, his meaning. But the qualities which
he enumerates-and clearness--may be found in prose styles
which have little or no distinction; and distinction, in the strict
sense of the word, Matthew Arnold's has. It is an unmistakably
individual style, and, in spite of its obvious mannerisms and
occasional affectations, is extremely difficult of imitation. It is
a style which is not free from some caprices that 'prose of the
centre' would avoid, but which, at its best, is about as near
a fulfilment as is humanly possible of his own ideals of order
and lucidity, with the added graces of ease, elegance and a grave
rhythmical movement, the effect of which, like that of the best
music, can be felt but never adequately described.
6
Their common connection with Rugby and Oxford, and the
imperishable commemoration of their Oxford friendship in
Thyrsis, inseparably link with the name of Matthew Arnold
that of Arthur Hugh Clough. Clough was Arnold's senior by
some four years, and their friendship was founded on a deep
mutual respect for each other's character and intellectual powers.


## p. 103 (#119) ############################################

IV]
Arthur Hugh Clough
103
6
>
‘You and Clough,' Arnold writes to his sister Fanny in 18591,'are,
I believe, the two people I in my heart care most to please by
what I write'; and, at the time of Clough's death, he speaks to
his mother of his loss as one 'which I shall feel more and more
as time goes on, for he is one of the few people who ever made
a deep impression upon me? ' The most elaborate tribute paid
to him in Last Words on Translating Homer is well known:
the 'admirable Homeric qualities' of The Bothie are there duly
noted ; 'but that in him of which I think oftenest is the Homeric
simplicity of his literary life. ' The impression which Clough made
on Arnold was largely due to the fact that they were both in the
same 'movement of mind' in the England of their day. In any
comparison, however, between Arnold and Clough, it should be
remembered that, probably, the former has given us all the poetry
that was in him, while Clough died young.
Arthur Hugh Clough was born in Liverpool on 1 January
1819. In 1828, he was put to school at Chester, whence he
shortly afterwards went to Rugby. At Rugby, Clough became
Thomas Arnold's ideal pupil, and he left the school, in 1837, with
a great reputation and a Balliol scholarship. Like Matthew
Arnold after him, he only took a second class in the Oxford
schools, but so much was thought of him that he was soon made
a fellow and tutor of Oriel. He resigned both fellowship and
tutorship in 1848 because of his inability to subscribe any longer
to the faith of the church of England. Few of the remarkable
group of Oxford men who found themselves "contention-tost'
in the welter of the tractarian agitation were so dominated by
a single-minded endeavour after truth as Clough. Most of his
poetry is the record of the spiritual and intellectual struggles into
which he was plunged by the religious unrest of the time. In
1854, he married Blanche Smith, who was a first cousin of Florence
Nightingale; and, in the work of the latter during and after the
Crimean war, Clough took the liveliest interest. His health, never
at any time very strong, began to give way in 1859. After
long and weary wanderings on the continent, he died at Florence
on 13 November 1861.
The record of Clough's literary activity is mainly concerned with
poetry; he wrote but little prose of permanent value and interest,
and that only in the form of scattered articles, which his wife
collected and reprinted long after his death. His first poem to
appear in print was the ‘long-vacation pastoral' in hexameters,
1 Letters, vol. 1, p. 102.
? Letters, vol. I, p. 152.


## p. 104 (#120) ############################################

104
Arthur Hugh Clough [CH.
6
The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich? , composed immediately after
he left Oxford—the liberation song of an emancipated soul.
He had already written short poems, and these were, soon after-
wards, published (1849), first in a volume called Ambarvalia, the
joint production of Clough and his friend Thomas Burbridge, and,
subsequently, in a separate form. These poems include several
,
of the best of his shorter lyrics, such as Qua Cursum Ventus
(recording the break of his friendship with W. G. Ward), Qui
Laborat Orat, The New Sinai, The Questioning Spirit, Sic Itur,
Duty, The Higher Courage-all poems which bear the marks of
the spiritual conflict of his Oxford days.
During a visit to Rome in 1849, Clough composed his second
hexameter poem, Amours de Voyage, and, in the following year,
at Venice, he began Dipsychus. This latter poem, like Mari
Magno—a series of modern’tales introduced and told in a manner
reminiscent of Chaucer—'was not published,' as we are told in
the collected edition of the poet's works, 'during the author's
lifetime, and should not be regarded as having received his
finishing touches. ' The works recorded here, together with a
number of other lyrics of which the group entitled Songs in
Absence are the most notable and a few satirical and reflective
pieces, constitute the sum of Clough's poetical productions.
Of few poets can it be said more positively than of Clough
that his appeal is, and always must be, to a select and limited
audience. His poetry can never be popular, not only because
much of it is too introspective, but because the form of two of
his most elaborate poems will remain a stumbling-block to the
average English reader of poetry. 'Carmen Hexametrum,' says
Ascham in The Scholemaster, ‘doth rather trotte and hoble than
runne smoothly in our English tong,' and his words are still true
in spite of nineteenth-century efforts to establish that measure
in our common prosody. Neither Matthew Arnold's advocacy of
it as the fit medium of Homeric translation, nor Bagehot's
description of it, in discussing Clough’s hexameters, as ‘perhaps
the most flexible of English metres, disposes of the hard fact that,
to quote again from Bagehot, no 'consummate poem of great
length and sustained dignity' has ever yet been written in it in
English. To say, as one of his admirers does, that Clough's
hexameters are unlike those of any other writer in any language
and better than those of any other English author,' and that
1 The more familiar title The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich was given to it after-
wards.


## p. 105 (#121) ############################################

Iv]
Clough's Later Poems
105
he had in his mind a very subtle and consistent conception of
the harmonies of the measure, is but to emphasise the charge
that the poet was remote and required a specially instructed class
of readers to appreciate him. But it will not do to dismiss him,
as Swinburne, markedly appreciative of Arnold's Attic grace,
did, as being no poet at all. In actual achievement, he is, indeed,
but one of the inheritors of unfulfilled renown. ' Time conquered
him before he attained to full clearness of poetic utterance.
When we have proved, each on his course alone,
The wider world, and learnt what's now unknown,
Have made life clear, and worked out each a way,
We'll meet again,-we shall have much to say,
he sings in one of his most touching lyrics. But the future day,'
. '
on which he was to fulfil this covenant with readers of his poetry,
never dawned for him. His later poems, however-particularly
.
Mari Magno-show that he was gradually feeling after a mel-
lower and a richer note. His brief married life was beginning to
.
enlarge and to deepen his experience, and, had he lived to write
more, his poetry would have embodied a more profound criticism
of life. ' It would certainly have become less self-centred and less
preoccupied with the questionings and doubts of the solitary
spirit.
These doubts and questionings form the substance of what was
probably his most ambitious work, Dipsychus—a poem consisting
of a series of dialogues between the poet himself and an attendant
spirit, who is an obvious, though distant, relative of Goethe's
Mephistopheles. Clough, like Arnold, was largely a disciple of
Goethe; and the influence of Hermann und Dorothea is to be
clearly seen both in the form and in the thought of The Bothie. But,
both The Bothie and Dipsychus reflect far more of the intellectual
atmosphere of Oxford and of the free open-air life of England than
they do of either the art or the philosophy of Goethe. The best
expression of Clough's own character and genius is, undoubtedly,
to be found in the 'long-vacation pastoral. ' The poet's humour
tempers the hexameter with mercy, and gives it, in places, a semi-
burlesque effect which is not without suggestion of the best uses to
which the measure may be turned in English. The poem, however,
is thoroughly serious in its main drift and purpose, dealing, as it
does, with social problems which were then being eagerly discussed
by the more thoughtful minds of the time, and, particularly, with
the ideal of true womanhood. That ideal Clough himself finds in
Meanest utilities seized as occasions to grace and embellish;


## p. 106 (#122) ############################################

106
Arthur Hugh Clough [CH.
and the whole poem is a protest against the conception of
feminine grace and embellishment as consisting of vulgar decora-
tion and intellectual insipidity. But the most charming features
of The Bothie are its delightful pictures of nature, which show
how fresh was Clough's enjoyment of natural scenery, and how
deep and intimate was his communion with the very soul of
the Highlands. Many discerning readers express a preference
for some of Clough's shorter lyrics to everything else he wrote,
and they are probably right. He wrote nothing so likely to
keep his name and memory alive as the best of Songs in Absence.
A host of readers, who know little else of his work, know him
by Say not the struggle nought availeth; and, during the period
of the greatest national stress ever endured by his countrymen,
few lines have been more frequently quoted for consolation and
hope than
For, while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
Although James Thomson, second poet of the name, belongs to
no school, and defies classification with any poetic fraternity, his
place in literary history is, perhaps, most appropriately fixed in
proximity to the poets of doubt and of the sceptical reaction. '
But he stands quite apart from his companions both in personal
character and temperament and in the life-long struggle which he
was condemned to wage with what might well seem to him a
malign fate. In the poetry of the others, even the depths of their
despair are not without gleams of something divine. But all that
is most authentic and arresting in the poetry of James Thomson is
absolutely without hope, and without God in the world. It is the
poetry of sheer, overmastering, inexorable despair--a passionate,
and almost fierce, declaration of faith in pessimism as the only true
philosophy of life. Here we have one who unequivocally affirms
that every struggle brings defeat
Because Fate holds no prize to crown success;
That all the oracles are dumb or cheat
Because they have no secret to express;
That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain
Because there is no light behind the curtain;
That all is vanity and nothingness.
The City of Dreadful Night, from which these lines are taken, is
far from being all that is of account in the poetry of Thomson; he
could strike other, and more cheerful, cbords. But this poem is so


## p. 107 (#123) ############################################

Iv]
James Thomson
107
distinctively individual and sincere an utterance springing from
the depths of the poet's own feelings and experience, and is so
powerful and original a thing in itself, as to make it the one
supreme achievement in verse by which Thomson is, and probably
will be remembered.
James Thomson was the son of a sailor and was born at Port
Glasgow in November 1834. While he was quite a small boy, a
sudden breakdown in his father's health brought the family into
very low circumstances, and forced them to seek better fortune in
London. At the age of nine, he was admitted to the Royal Cale-
donian Asylum, where he spent probably the happiest eight years of
his life. In 1850, he entered the military training school at Chelsea,
with a view to qualifying as an army schoolmaster. In 1851, he
was appointed teacher in a garrison station at Ballincollig, a village
near Cork, and here he met two persons who had no small influence
upon his subsequent career. One was a young girl, Matilda Weller
by name, for whom the poet formed a passionate attachment, and
whose early death appears to have left him wandering, on his own
testimony, in
a waste of arid woe
Never refreshed by tears.
At Ballincollig, he also met Charles Bradlaugh, then a trooper in a
regiment of dragoons, and it was mainly under his tuition that
Thomson became an atheist, and, subsequently, cast in his lot with
a small but intrepid London band of free-thinking journalists.
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.