by Dinah Roe
While new schools of poetry regularly find themselves the subject of critical scorn in their own time, their work is often recognized and rehabilitated in later years. The Pre-Raphaelites, however, suffered blows from which they have yet to recover. Part of the problem is that such attacks were seldom unprovoked. Even in its beginnings as a fine-art movement, Pre-Raphaelitism courted controversy, goading the critical establishment with paintings representing, for example, the Virgin Mary as a rangy adolescent in a nightgown.5 Oscar Wilde noted that the painters ‘had on their side three things that the English public never forgives: youth, power and enthusiasm’.6 Pre-Raphaelite poets proved equally unforgivable.
Defining just who these poets were is a tricky business. From the outset, the group was characterized by protean shifts in membership, parameters and objectives. Some Pre-Raphaelite poets were self-appointed while others had Pre-Raphaelitism thrust upon them, often by hostile contemporary critics. Between the movement’s beginnings in the late 1840s and its end (around the turn of the century), its ranks would include Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburne, George Meredith, Christina Rossetti, William Bell Scott, William Allingham, Arthur O’Shaughnessy and John Payne, among others. As befits this loose and baggy collective, many of these would reject the term later in life.
Although its end date is harder to define, Pre-Raphaelitism’s origins are well documented. Frustrated with the traditional approach to painting taught at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, seven young artists formed a group called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) in 1848.7 The painters were: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, James Collinson and Frederic Stephens. The non-painters were sculptor Thomas Woolner and PRB secretary William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel’s brother.
Although the Brotherhood was formed in 1848, it was not particularly exercised by the revolutions breaking out in Europe or the Chartist uprisings at home. Its rebellion was artistic rather than political; the 1848 release of Richard Monckton Milnes’s Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats was far more significant to the PRB than the London publication of the Communist Manifesto in the same year. This apolitical stance would remain characteristic of Pre-Raphaelite work, though some of its associates would develop an interest in politics. William Morris, for example, became an outspoken socialist while Swinburne supported the Italian liberation movement.
The PRB’s original aims were to rebel against Royal Academy conventions governing composition, technique and subject matter. With youthful arrogance, these painters, the eldest of whom was only twenty-four, rejected Academy-approved work as the ‘sloshy’ legacy of ‘Sir Sloshua’ himself, better known as the first RA President, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92). They advocated a rejection of classicism and a self-conscious return to the traditions of medieval painting that came ‘before Raphael’ and the Renaissance, hence ‘Pre-Raphaelite’.8 Though they did not have a definite methodology, the PRB painters were determined to follow a programme of ‘truth to nature’, as earnestly outlined by William Michael Rossetti:
1, to have genuine ideas to express; 2, to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them; 3, to sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote; and 4, most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.9
Comparable, at least in spirit, to the Young British Artists of the 1990s, members of the PRB were in open rebellion against what they saw as the tired, derivative traditions of British art. They actively sought to shock, and found a strength in numbers that they would not have had as individuals. Instead of painting idealized figures, the PRB used live models whose faces were recognizably ‘modern’ rather than classical. They pioneered a striking technique of painting, using vivid colours on a wet white ground, with flattened figures outlined in almost photographic detail. Many of their early works show that Pre-Raphaelitism was intimately connected with literature from the very beginning. Alongside biblical subjects, PRB painters depicted scenes and characters from Shakespeare, Keats and Tennyson.
Though Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais had signed their pictures with the initials ‘PRB’ as early as 1849, it was not until they were recognized as a movement in 1850 that their pictures attracted the ire of contemporary critics. They were reprimanded for their use of detailed imagery and symbolism, which was perceived as being dangerously close to ‘Romanism’. At the same time, their unidealized subjects, such as the skinny red-headed Christ child in Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50), were considered blasphemous. Encouraged by PRB associate Coventry Patmore, John Ruskin, the influential art critic and author of Modern Painters (1843–60), defended the Brotherhood in the Times in 1851. Though the short-lived PRB disbanded that year, its impact on art and literature continued throughout the century.
Literary Pre-Raphaelitism ran concurrently with the artistic movement, and, like the visual artists, the early poets took an interest in both the medieval and the very modern. In 1848, Rossetti and Holman Hunt drew up a list of ‘Immortals’ whose work demonstrated ‘that there was no immortality for humanity except in reputation gained by man’s own genius or heroism’.10 While Jesus Christ headed the list, the majority of these heroes were painters or poets. The poets predictably included Homer, Dante Alighieri, Boccaccio and Shakespeare. But established, canonical names were balanced by those of more contemporary writers. The list included the recent Romantic poets Byron, Keats and Shelley, as well as living writers like William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Coventry Patmore. Particularly admired figures were given a star-rating, with the result that Robert Browning, whose work was by no means universally praised at the time, was placed on equal footing with Dante and Homer. Minor poet and Pre-Raphaelite associate Coventry Patmore received the same number of stars as Boccaccio.
This diversity was reflected in the poetry which grew out of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1850, the group published a literary magazine, The Germ: Thoughts Towards Nature in Poetry, Literature, and Art. This contained poems, essays and pictures, some of which were directly about fine art, but most of which reflected a more general desire to challenge the status quo. In literary as well as pictorial terms, this meant making art utterly modern by a paradoxical return to the ‘serious and heartfelt’ philosophy and practices of the medieval age, and the transcendent, symbolic beauty of nature.
The poems are generally set in rural landscapes whose natural details, true to PRB principles, are minutely expressed, as in the sixth stanza of Thomas Woolner’s ‘Of My Lady in Death’:
Speargrass stoops with watery beads:
The weight from its fine tips
Occasionally drips:
The bee drops in the mallow-bloom, and feeds.
Curiously, while most of the poetry focuses on rural scenes, Pre-Raphaelitism was an urban movement. The natural world to which it swore fealty was not experienced on a daily basis, but was a landscape remembered, imagined or conjured out of time spent in London’s parks and green spaces or the rural retreats of friends, reached by the ever-expanding network of the new railway. In the hands of the early Pre-Raphaelite poets, nature functioned allegorically. Following the precedent set by the Romantic poets, the Pre-Raphaelite natural world often reflected a speaker’s state of mind, as in Woolner’s ‘Emblems’ and William Bell Scott’s ‘Morning Sleep’, or was freighted with suggestive symbols, as in Walter Deverell’s ‘The Sight Beyond’ and Christina Rossetti’s ‘Sweet Death’. But the debt to Romanticism needs qualifying. Very few Pre-Raphaelite poems sound remotely like Wordsworth, whose influence was overlaid by that of his successor as Poet Laureate, Alfred Tennyson. In terms of poetic language, the Pre-Raphaelites looked to the ‘second generation’ of Romantic poets, especially to Keats, rath
er than Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
The medievalism which would come to dominate mid-century Pre-Raphaelite writing was also in evidence in the Germ, in titles such as ‘My Beautiful Lady’, ‘Of My Lady in Death’, ‘The Blessed Damozel’; and in poems whose chivalrous heroes pined for unattainable ladies. Even Christina Rossetti, sister to Dante Gabriel and William Michael and the only woman to publish with the Brotherhood, was not immune to this neo-medievalist influence, writing under a pseudonym borrowed from an old ballad, ‘Ellen Alleyn’. Other significant non-PRB contributors were Ford Madox Brown, Coventry Patmore and John Tupper.
A cultivated melancholy was another notable feature of the Germ poems, and would become a leading characteristic of Pre-Raphaelite writing. It is typified by Christina Rossetti’s ‘Dream Land’, ‘A Pause of Thought’ and ‘An End’, poems whose mournful tone would influence the work of Elizabeth Siddal, Philip Bourke Marston and John Payne. Contemporary critics often pointed to this elegiac strain as a sign of Pre-Raphaelitism’s unhealthy and ‘morbid’ tendencies, particularly in the love poetry.
As much a social network as a poetic or artistic school, Pre-Raphaelitism always permitted works of less obvious merit to ride on the coat-tails of its better productions. Along with innovative contributions by Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Germ contains its share of clanking lines: ‘The uncouth moth upon the window-panes / Hath ceased to flap …’; ‘When Viola, a servant of the Duke, / Of him she loved the page, went, sent by him’; ‘Like those who in dense theatre and hall, / When fire breaks out or weight-strained rafters fall, / Towards some egress struggle doubtfully’.11
Pre-Raphaelite poetry in the Germ was, appropriately enough, very much a work-in-progress, but some of its enduring qualities were already manifest. Anticipating the direction Pre-Raphaelite poetry would take after the dissolution of the PRB, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’ successfully binds together elements which in other poems are disparate and clashing. It has a consistency of tone and a painterly attention to detail which make its stylized gestures convincing in their own terms:
The blessed Damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven:
Her blue grave eyes were deeper much
Than a deep water, even.
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary’s gift,
On the neck meetly worn;
And her hair, lying down her back,
Was yellow like ripe corn.12
(ll. 1–12)
The core of Rossetti’s technique is here: the Damozel’s hair, for example, is both a mystical attribute and an emblem of natural fertility; verbal patterning (the way the word ‘even’ sits oddly between ‘Heaven’ and ‘seven’, the slide from ‘robe’ to ‘wrought’ to ‘rose’, the half-rhyme of ‘neck’ and ‘back’) is powerful but controlled and purposive. Rossetti was not always as good as this, but this is what he could do.
The influence of the Germ on other young artists far exceeded its poor sales, which brought the magazine to an end after only four issues. One important effect of the magazine, which included pictures by Holman Hunt, Collinson, Deverell and Ford Madox Brown, was the creation of permanent links between Pre-Raphaelite illustration and poetry. As Lorraine Kooistra points out, the subsequent Pre-Raphaelite illustrations provided for William Allingham’s The Music Master (1855) and the edition of Tennyson’s Poems published by Edward Moxon (1857) brought a collaborative spirit and a new respectability to the commercial art of book illustration in the nineteenth century.13
There has been a tendency among later critics to keep Pre-Raphaelite painting in a separate compartment from poetry; its originators perceived no such necessity. Inspired by the work of poet-painter William Blake, the group were especially interested in how text and image worked together to create meaning.14 Members of the Brotherhood were in the habit of writing poems to accompany their paintings, and producing paintings to illustrate each other’s poems. Dante Gabriel Rossetti would even inscribe verses directly on to his picture frame. This juxtaposition of text and image, found in illuminated manuscripts and stained glass, forms part of the ‘medievalism’ that the Pre-Raphaelites helped to popularize, but its significance goes well beyond this phenomenon: it influenced not just a ‘Gothic’ but a ‘graphic’ revival in English literary culture.
In 1856, another phase of Pre-Raphaelitism began, once again as a collaboration between painters and poets. Oxford undergraduates and aspiring painters Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris produced a periodical called the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, whose medievalist writing was so deeply influenced by the Germ that Dante Gabriel Rossetti referred to it as ‘The Oxford and Cambridge Germ’.15 In 1857, this trio, along with Valentine Prinsep, Arthur Hughes and others, painted Arthurian murals on the walls of the Oxford Union Debating Room.16 During this sojourn, another Oxford undergraduate, Algernon Charles Swinburne, introduced himself. This new group formed Pre-Raphaelitism’s second wave, which crested with the publication of Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere in 1858.17
Dedicated to Rossetti, this work was identified by contemporary critics as the first Pre-Raphaelite book of poetry. Swinburne would later note in the Fortnightly Review that the volume ‘seems to have been now lauded and now decried as the result and expression of a school rather than a man’.18 A positive review in the Tablet pointed out that the ‘dedication … suggests already the Pre-Rafaelite sympathies of the author, and the book itself fully establishes them’.19 These ‘sympathies’ were viewed with a suspicion that set the tone for future criticism of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. The Athenaeum rejected Morris’s ‘book of Pre-Raphaelite minstrelsy as a curiosity which shows how far affectation may mislead an earnest man towards the fog-land of Art’.20 With some exceptions, Morris’s first volume was either ignored or badly received, and was neither a critical nor a commercial success. One admirer, however, came directly from the ‘List of Immortals’. Robert Browning, whose dramatic monologues heavily influenced The Defence of Guenevere, wrote to William Michael Rossetti that Morris’s were ‘the only new poems to my mind since there’s no telling when’.21 It took Browning, a poet equally underappreciated in his own time, to perceive the modern innovations beneath the ‘fog-land’ of Morris’s medieval locations and protagonists.
Formally inventive, the title poem combines terza rima and elements of dramatic monologue. Beginning in medias res, it embodies the medievalism, eroticism, immediacy and pictorial detail that had come to be associated with the Pre-Raphaelites:
But, knowing now that they would have her speak,
She threw her wet hair backward from her brow,
Her hand close to her mouth touching her cheek …
(ll. 1–3)
On trial for her life, the adulterous Queen Guenevere prepares to defend herself, using her beauty to distract her voyeuristic accusers. She invites them to ‘see my breast rise, / Like waves of purple sea’ and to observe ‘through my long throat how the words go up / In ripples to my mouth …’ (ll. 226–7, 230–31). This kind of knowing female sexuality, which never ceased to attract attention, would become a major theme of later Pre-Raphaelite work.
Although its poetry was becoming increasingly significant, Pre-Raphaelitism’s fine-art connections were by no means on the wane. No longer just young pretenders, Rossetti and Holman Hunt had become commercially successful painters and Millais was a member of the RA. In 1861, Morris, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and others formed a decorative arts firm which in 1875 became the famous and influential Morris & Co. Its formation inaugurated the Arts and Crafts Movement, which, in opposition to the rise of mechanically mass-produced items, advocated the design of hand-crafted, individualized pieces for the home as well as for public buildings. In this way, a Pre-Raphaelite resistance to the i
ncreasingly mechanized Victorian age influenced the private domestic environment as well as public spaces.
The first successful Pre-Raphaelite publication came neither from the original Brotherhood nor the second wave of Oxford painters and poets. Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862), with illustrations by Dante Gabriel, was so well received that Swinburne breathlessly dubbed her ‘the Jael who led their [Pre-Raphaelite] host to victory’.22 Christina’s subsequent devotional work would gradually abandon the medievalist, fantasy spirit that animates poems like ‘Goblin Market’ and ‘The Prince’s Progress’. But her early poems were received as distinctly Pre-Raphaelite. Such was the impact of Goblin Market that in 1894 she was still being referred to as ‘Queen of the Pre-Raphaelites’.23