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

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
In the course of the history of all the arts, and perhaps most plainly in the history of poetry, similar conditions recur, not in particulars, but in general outline. The different circumstances of each age naturally modify the conditions away from accurate similarity, but in the main development of the art, a time comes when it follows lines resembling those it has previously followed, and this analogous condition has been produced by similar causes. I have already in other places noticed such a similarity between the creation of a literary poetry—to use an inadequate term—by Keats, and that of a similar kind of poetry by Rossetti and Morris. Both poetries have little to do with the age in which they were written. They reject, on the whole, the present and abide in the past. Their subjects are not the subjects of their day, nor are they influenced to any great extent by the thoughts or emotions of the world around them. Their main desire is to live outside of that world, to assimilate a different realm of thought and feeling, to find beauty as she was in the past not as she seems to be in the present, to live in the imagined not in the actual world; and yet to keep the imagined world true to the main lines of ​nature and human nature. "Let us escape," they cry, "into a lovelier earth, a purer air, a simpler and more natural life."
We can trace, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the beginnings of such a cry in Arnold's passing endeavour to find his subjects in Greek, Norse, and mediæval story, in his reiterated longing for beauty and calm, apart from the noise of warring thought and low desires. We have looked back to the time when in the fifties and sixties of the last century the old faiths and theories of life were thrown into the hissing furnace of scientific and historical criticism, and no one knew what would emerge when the amalgam had cooled. We have seen how this confused world, and the tossed world of his own heart, were too much for Arnold. He could not escape from the trouble when he was young. He never quite escaped from it. But Rossetti did, and so did Morris.
The history of their poetry repeats the history of the poetry of Keats. It had no connexion with the thoughts concerning man and the war around them which so deeply influenced poetry from Blake to Shelley. The ideas Shelley sought to revive, those also which Byron drove at the heads of men, made the slightest possible impression on Keats. He does not, on the whole, seem to be aware of their existence. The controversies, furies, and passions which had collected round them in the realms of social, political, and religious thought, and which had lashed Byron and Shelley into poetic ​rage, were to him, if ever he deigned to be conscious of them, weariness and vexation of spirit. And the condition of the England in which he lived and of which he said, "Glory and loveliness have passed away," gave him no impulse. He did not go to Italy or Greece in the body, but he fled thither in the spirit. He sought loveliness and young ardours in fable, in love's world of myth, legend, and tale. There, he thought, beauty lies asleep, and I will be the young prince who shall awake her. And through the deep undergrowth not of the briar-rose, but of thorn and thistle, hemlock and darnel, his fervid spirit pierced its way. He kissed the princess and she awoke to life. Together they brought forth a new poetry. It was a lovely child, but, unsupported, unnourished by any emotion of the present, only living in the past, it never married itself to any vital power in the England of its day, and it had then no children. It was an episode in the great epic of poetry; and when the new movement, about 1832, began with Tennyson and Browning it did not follow Keats into the beauty of the past; it knit itself to living emotions and ideas of the present. For England had then, as I have already noticed in this book, awakened to fresh thought and national passion, to new ideas and their attendant emotions; and out of these proceeded powers of action which ran like fire through the whole body of men and women who loved thoughts, and thought out what they loved.
That is a slight sketch of the history of the poetry of ​Keats. I have elsewhere expanded it and do not wish to repeat it. A similar history now unfolded itself. By 1853, when Rossetti had finished the poems which we find in his first volume, the ideas and their impelling emotions which had begun to shape themselves clearly in 1830, which had awakened in England a political, religious, and social movement, and which, by their passion, had stirred Browning, Tennyson, and others to write poetry—were subjected to continual attacks, rapidly developing through the following years, from historical criticism and science. Doubt, especially in the case of the religious ideas, collected round them. So far as the history of poetry is concerned, the struggle took place over religious conceptions, both those held by the orthodox, and by the more liberal theologians. The ideas accepted with joy from the school of which Newman was the moving force, or from the school which Maurice may be said to have founded, were now denied or at least subjected to a cold investigation. And what had been their beauty was stained, till there was little or no pleasure and peace left in them for the imagination. Tennyson and Browning, however, would not let their spiritual essence go. Browning did not descend into the arena at all, nor was he one whit disturbed by the noise of the contest. He went quietly on, realising his own soul and what it had to say. Tennyson did enter into the fight, and was somewhat disturbed by it. In Memoriam, published in 1850, records what he thought of it during ​the years between 1842 and '50. Later on, his description of that dim grim battle in the West where Arthur died, himself in doubt, and where friend and foe were shadows in the mist,
was his record of this time, and all it meant for those who, in its war, still held to their standards. Nor indeed, when he wrote the Passing of Arthur, was his own soul freed from the agony of the battle. Nevertheless, he did not give way. Like St. Paul, "cast down but not destroyed," there were certain heights of faith and thought in his secret soul to which, undismayed, and unheeding of the confused strife, he retired when he pleased. But the others—down in the heat of the contest, on the burning sand—we have seen in what a condition they were in the poetry of Clough and Arnold. Misery and restlessness; changing and divided thoughts; doubts and longing for peace and calm; nothing left but duty; faith retired to her interlunar cave; the noise and confusion of the battle driving men distracted who cared for the ancient ideals; even among those who had no poetic instincts a certain vague distress; beauty gone, ugliness and tumult filling the world of thought. And in common life, materialism growing; conventions and maxims again tyrannising over society; art, creation, imagination, and truth ​utterly gone out of it. This was the state of things even in 1847 when Rossetti began to write poetry, much more in 1853 when his first poems were finished, still more in the sixties of the last century.
It was a state of things which the artist nature rebelled against, as, not in identical but in similar circumstances, Keats had rebelled. A whole tribe of young men, to whom Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement and afterwards Morris, Burne-Jones, and others, gave expression, were weary to death of all the turmoil round subjects which (as they were presented to them at the moment) did not interest them at all, much less excite or impel them. All that Arnold. wrote about with so much intensity, all the waters of thought in which he struggled, were as little to them as all the ideas which Byron and Shelley wrote of were to Keats. They broke away from them, like Keats, into another world—a new world of beauty and art.
The theological contests were outside of their theology which was concerned, when it existed, and for a time it did exist, not with doctrine and its battles, but with the inner mystic relation between the personal soul and the divine, between the saints, angels, and spirits of the universe and their own spirit here on earth. They were, in their early career, and especially Rossetti, mystics by nature and grace. Doubts did not trouble them at all. They either believed or disbelieved. Historical criticism and science bored them to extinction. They cried: "Away with these ​follies and phantasms. That which actually is, is not in them. They are in the apparent, not the real world. Why should we walk through their mud and lade ourselves with their thick clay? The constancy of energy, the correlation of physical forces, natural selection, the struggle for existence, the descent of man, whether the Bible be infallible or not—if it be beautiful and instil peace is all we care for—are outside our world. For us, they might as well be discussed in Sirius. Let us get away from this vain disquiet to quiet, from futile argument to fruitful contemplation, from materialism to the spiritual, from this ugly world to a beautiful one, from theological squabbles to religious symbols, from fighting sects to the invisible Church, from Science and its quarrels to the great creations of imagination, from convention to truth in art, from imitation of dead forms of art to Nature herself. Let us leave a world, noisy, base through money-seeking, torn and confused with physical and mental ugliness, worried with dry criticism of history and futile contentions of doctrine, to the realm of pure faith, or, if we cannot or do not care to believe, to that pure image of beauty which we see once more rising from the Sea of Time. And for that we will turn back to the bygone centuries, to their thought and their work, to a world noble, lovely, joyous, full of passionate subjects, close to Nature, thrilling with possibilities for the imagination; a world which believed in a spiritual life; which understood how to love, how to forgive, ​how to live in honour, how to despise wealth for beauty's sake; and which, inspired by great thoughts and yielding itself to natural passion and its joy, created with intelligent rapture, and day by day, beautiful things in all the arts.
Such was the spirit of these men and such their outlook on the world. It was a spirit and an outlook similar (except in its somewhat transient religious or mystic turn) to the spirit and outlook of Keats. And it is well that we should know,—and especially those who think sceptical criticism so vitally important, and science and its discoveries and the analytic intellect with its nose on facts, the master-powers of the world at whose footstool all should bow; and conclusions established by pure reasoning as the only truths;—that there are still a whole class of men in this manifold world of ours who do not care one straw for all these matters; to whom the talk about them and their discoveries are practically non-existent in thought; who would not be very sorry if they were all forgotten; who live outside of them altogether, and think them needless; who abhor the money-making side of them; and who believe that they are likely to do serious damage—as long as they are unbalanced by the things which make for imagination, beauty, and the spiritual life—to high morality, to the love of perfection, to man's happiness, and to the true progress of mankind. These persons, even in these extremes, it is to be hoped will not diminish. They provide a counterpoise to the ​tyrannies of the scientific intellect, they keep up the balance of power in human life. Silently, for they make no noise and only live their lives, they lead men into worlds where they can rest; and even in ignorance and poverty find inward wealth and joy and sweet content.
In his day Rossetti, ignoring the science and caring nothing for the contending faiths of the present, began a new phase of that ever-recurring movement, both in poetry and painting. Morris followed him into the realm of the past, but separated himself more determinately from a present he detested than Rossetti. He never touched for years a single political, religious, scientific, or social interest of his own time. Rossetti did; being, as a poet, more manifold than Morris. What interest they took in the present was taken in its arts, not in its theological, critical, or scientific work. Holman Hunt, Millais, and afterwards Burne-Jones, flung away, as artists, the traditions which ruled the art of their times, and went back to the early Italian painters for the spirit in which they conceived their art and the duty they owed to it. They filled their pictures with thought and imaginative symbolism, but they did this within the limits of a careful and steady obedience to truth—truth to their subjects and truth to nature. A fresh and living movement of art in painting and drawing was born from these endeavours.
At the same time, and filled with a similar spirit, ​the new poetry arose. It was indeed new. No one can for a moment bring together on the same plane of thought or imagination, of passion or of the reception of sensible impressions, the poetry of Tennyson, Browning, Clough, or Arnold, and the poetry of Rossetti or Morris. The air is different, the landscape different, the manner of thinking and feeling different, the subjects different, the methods and the aims of art different, the inspiration drawn from different sources, and the material different. It was as new a poetical world as that of Keats was in his time. It was also an interlude. It had no children or none of any importance. Its apartness from the present made it delightful, but it condemned it to sterility. Its analogy in that to the poetry of Keats is striking. But it is much more striking in the poetry of Morris than in that of Rossetti. The revolt of Morris from the present was much greater. Indeed, Rossetti more or less maintained that "all work to be truly worthy"—and I quote words he has put into the mouth of a character in the unfinished story of St. Agnes of Intercession—"should be wrought out of the age itself, as well as out of the soul of its producer, which must needs be a soul of the age." He did not, from my present point of view, carry out that sentence fully in his work, but he came closer to it than was the case with the poetry Morris wrote before he became a Socialist. The modern element is plain in his treatment of Jenny, though the problem is universal. The Burden of Nineveh, welds ​together in his thought London and Nineveh, the religion, the future and the fates of both; and outside his thoughts, as he sees the winged bull brought into the British Museum, the din and crowds of London go by. At times, the political interests of the world took hold upon him. The revolutionary movement of 1848 was hailed by him, when priests turned white and kings were in the dust. He hears the cry of Italy, and the Last Confession, in itself a modern poem, is thrilled throughout with the Italian hatred of Austria. On the Staircase of Notre Dame, on the Place de la Bastille, he feels the emancipation of Paris and the world. He denounced the atrocious business of 1851. He wrote a half-felt ode on the death and work of Wellington in 1852.
Then, there are short poems, of a delicate and majestic pity, on such sorrowful and heart-subduing incidents as he touched in daily life. Between Holmscote and Hurstcote is a lovely example of this. Moreover, even in poems which treat subjects belonging to a remote past, there is often a modern touch, a dim reference to the temper and thoughts of the modern world, which bring, floating into the antique tale, a breath, a wind, from the life of the nineteenth century. These wafts of modernism often give body to his mystic story, and a strange clearness to the past of which he writes.
Again, among a number of poems which treat of love and other passions, and belong to the common life of ​man at any time, there are a few which are concerned with the problems of life, moral and spiritual, and which, in their mode of thought and expression, are entirely modern—so modern that even now, nearly fifty years after they were written, they paint our souls. They are of our subtilty, our obscurity, our passionate self-extension; our hopes, fears, faith, and faithlessness. In many wandering ways of careful thought, they ask what is our life. Of these are all the sonnets which form the second part of the House of Life, and poems like the Card Dealer, Cloud Confines, Soothsay, and a few others of less value. In these, love between the sexes which forms so large a part of his poetry can scarcely be said to exist. They knit themselves with a singular force around the life of man, his death, his pain, and his pleasure. They are weighty with thought, very subtle, yet very clear. The thinking does not run along the known philosophic lines. It avoids them, as if truth were not to be found on their roads. It moves, on the contrary, through the windings, impulses, passionate feelings of the self-neglecting soul, thinking and feeding in its silences around the memories, the regrets, the happiness and unhappiness of its past, around the hopes and fears of its future; searching into the fierce remorse and the stern demands that come from conscience; and questioning those aspirations of the spirit towards the unattainable perfection which deny and mock analysis. And, above all, they ask, with reiterated force—Why are things as ​they are? What shall we do, things being as they are? Soothsay is such a poem. The poetry belonging to these matters is perhaps the greatest, not the most beautiful, of all his work. It is marked by so masculine a concentration of thought and wording that it demands the closest attention and deserves it. It is not obscure save to inattention. On the contrary, in spite of all the infoldings of thought with thought, it is, by its anxious wording, as clear as a mountain spring. It is not only a poetical but an intellectual pleasure to follow its intricate involutions, made beautiful at every step by the play of a passionate imagination. And this is poetically enhanced by the careful art, by the technique which is not satisfied by anything less than perfection, and which, when perfection is not reached, makes us feel that it has been struggled for with the whole force and eagerness of the artist. One example of this, which is most patent in the sonnets, is the excellent use he makes of long Latin words which seem to open out and expand the thought and set it into a rush like a sudden flood over wide plains. Such words are chiefly adjectives, but they are so used as to have the force of a picture.
Another characteristic of this graver poetry is its unwearied symbolism—incessant images in words, in the sound of lines; illustrations which awaken emotions or ideas; images, created by the words, which leap into the vision of the soul, and bring with them a hundred meanings, suggestions, memories, and pict​ures. Rossetti is a master of this, and it was done by him in painting as well as in poetry. In poetry he was freer than in painting, and he used his freedom, sometimes too richly. He hurries one symbol into another, he folds and enfolds them together; they are labyrinthine; yet if we pursue them, we reach at last their centre, and their central thought, with their central emotion. Then, when we reach the centre, all the involutions are understood. There is no one, clearer than Rossetti. It may be that some of this clearness is owing to the music of the verse. That is another characteristic of his poetry. And his music does not seem to be the result of laborious art, but of a native genius for sweet sound. Everywhere we find this grace, in the lighter as in the graver poems. I give one example from a serious sonnet. Its melody flows like a soft stream—
Lastly, with regard to these serious poems which meet the questionings of modern life, some have said that the problems they treat of are similar to those of which Arnold wrote, and are met in a similar way. That is not the case. The Stoic solution, for example, never occurs to Rossetti. Moreover, the problems are not the simple ones Arnold meets and to which the intellect naturally applies itself, but the subtle, ​complicated questions of the spiritual and passionate life which are altogether outside of the sphere of the intellect, and ignore its methods. And, finally, the subjects are treated, without any special reference to his own soul or to his own time, from that universal point of view which considers human nature as it is independent of any personal feeling or of any isolated period. The later sonnets of The House of Life and other poems of a similar kind belong to the present of human nature, but they also belong to its past and its future.
I turn from this discussion of the modern element in Rossetti's poetry to other elements belonging to it. When we read the earlier poems, beginning with The Blessed Damozel, we must bring to our reading matters of thought imported from Italy in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, or from that ancient world where Lancelot and Tristram lived, or from that more sacred and earlier world which gathered its emotions, like flowers round a house, over the youth of Jesus, the days in Jerusalem after the Cross, and the legends of the Early Church. The elements of these worlds crept into the study of his imagination, were quick in his thought, and move out of his poems, even when they are outside of the Christian realm, into our reflection. They leave their spirit everywhere in his verse, like the distant scent of lavender in linen long laid by in oaken presses.
​Of these elements Italy was the chief—the Italy of Dante, and the poets who with him created Italian poetry; nor was modern Italy forgotten or unrepresented. It could not have been otherwise. His mother was half Italian. His father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a native of the Kingdom of Naples, a man of letters, a poet and patriot; forced to flee from the tyranny of Ferdinand I., and well known in England as a commentator and exponent of Dante. From his childhood Rossetti was trained to love his father's land, and its greatest poet, and his poetry as well as his painting were filled with the subjects and redolent of the mysticism of the wisdom-worn Italian. Yet so strong was Rossetti's clear individuality that no one can say he was an imitator of Dante. Whatever he drew from Dante he passed through the crucible of his own soul, and so mingled it with his own material that the result was incontestably his own. His spirit was dominant in it, not Dante's. Moreover, it was not only the austere and tender spirit of Dante of which he drank deep, but the pleasanter and lighter spirit of the men who before and after Dante made poetry within his circle. With these also he sympathised, but he drank more of their manner, a manner which was common to them all, than of their matter. For Rossetti, like Dante, was always somewhat severe, serious, even grim at times, when he wrote poetry. There was, indeed, another side to Rossetti-a wild, mocking Bohemian side, full of grim sarcastic humour, ​but this did not intrude into either of the arts he practised. The solemnities of our earthly life and of its passions more than its gaiety or pleasure were in this poetry daily guests. And his methods of writing, his style, his correction and finish, were as severe, as strictly conscientious to his art, as those of Dante or Milton. Otherwise, I do not compare him to them. The limits of Dante and Milton extend beyond our ken. The limits of Rossetti are clearly within our ken. But within them his matter and his manner were nobly grave, severe, temperate, and controlled, almost too controlled at times to have the ease and naturalness of the greater poets.
The manner then of his work was largely influenced by the early Italian poets, even by their perversity of logic in amorous poetry, but was not imitated from them. His vivid, intense individuality burnt up the possibility of imitation. Whatever he gripped, he gripped in his own way; and the way was original. And all that I have here said concerning the Italian influence in his poetry might be even more fully said of his works as a painter.
Again, one might expect that his poetry would be greatly influenced by mediæval romance, especially by the multitudinous tale of Arthur, with its dependencies. It may be said of him with truth that he was Galahad on one side of his nature and Tristram on another. But though he loved the tale, and oftentimes discussed it, it scarcely ever appears, even in allusion, ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/174 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/175 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/176 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/177 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/178 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/179 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/180 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/181 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/182 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/183 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/184 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/185 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/186 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/187 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/188 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/189 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/190 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/191 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/192 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/193 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/194 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/195 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/196 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/197 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/198 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/199 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/200 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/201 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/202 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/203 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/204 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/205 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/206 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/207 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/208 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/209 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/210 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/211 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/212 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/213 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/214 ​Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/215 ​garden of poetry, the flowers, the paths, the waters, the buildings, are of an exquisiteness, a finish, a colour and beauty which are rare, specialised, and of a seclusive charm. We walk in it for a time with a lonely pleasure, and then we leave it for the open country and the free air and the boundless ocean of poetry.
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